Incubator Fun
By Frank | July 20, 2010
Here is a short XtraNormal video about how to work with our incubator. Fun concept and fun to use. Still working on the creative side of it all.
Topics: Singapore Incubator, StartUp Ideas | No Comments »
Incubator Update
By Frank | July 15, 2010
Well I am sitting on a carpet at the United gate in Hong Kong. Mechanical trouble. What does that mean? A loose bolt on some seat? Engine not working? Something in between no doubt. An old Cheech and Chong routine had the character asking … hey man, have you checked the air in the tires?
The Small World Group Incubator is now up and running in Singapore. We have 6-8 groups wrestling with plans and developments and such trying to get in. And 2 of companies have incorporated with our encouragement so we expect full funding of these in August.
So perhaps it is time for a brief update.
Here is a set of short descriptions of some of what is coming -
- a solar PV company focusing on personal power systems for people in the 3rd world by providing affordable portable power
- a solar thermal company that has deep building modeling experience as well
- an LED lighting group with focus on unique controls
- a network equipment company where we hope to use their existing technology in some very different ways
- an optical idea that allows new ways to acquire 3D images
- a biology group that uses plants and other bio-active elements to improve the quality of life in homes.
- a novel Internet input device
- a group with novel algorithms and computer models for risk management
One constant theme has emerged. We like companies where their markets are new and untried and where there are obvious technical and price/performance points that are compelling. Start ups cannot expect to simply compete or somewhat better performance and especially not just on some lower price points.
Revolutionary over evolutionary.
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The Big Picture
By Frank | June 22, 2010
One of my favorite books is an autobiography of Thomas Edison published around 1934 very near the end of his life. In it, the author relates the observation that the phonograph was perhaps Edison’s most radical invention. You see, at the time, no one even thought it was possible to record people’s voices. The idea of hearing Lincoln’s voice is lost forever to us and his giving the Gettysburg Address. But we have not lost Neil Armstrong’s declaration upon first stepping onto the moon.
The author of the biography notes that when Edison had it working he took it to the Whitehouse to see the President of the USA and the entire group stayed up nearly all night trying it out!! You see in that first invention Edison had recording and playback in the same machine. To all assembled it was beyond their imagination.
That wow factor is often lost in today’s fast inventive world. But it is still all around us if we know how to look for it. Every once in a while we hear a story or an idea and if we can Grok it sufficiently it can be life changing. Let me tell you one that still has room for inventiveness. It is one of my most told stories.
In 1994 or 1995 at the Optical Fiber Conference (before optics was so popular or crashed), the keynote address of the conference was given by Bran Ferren who at the time was EVP of Disney’s Imagineering Group. This is the group that helped design the theme parks and was central to much of their creative efforts.
Ferren started off the keynote talk by asking a question – “This Internet thing, its a big deal right? But is it a big deal like the fax machine or like fire? You see the fax machine nearly put FedEx out of business because it stopped the sending of overnight mail. So it had global impact. But well, fire, it is one of the big inventions of all time.”
Well there were about 4000 of us there and there were only about 5-10 of us that did not go with Fax machine. I am happy to tell you I was one who voted for fire. And out of that group the company I founded ended up the largest supplier of fiber optic gear in the world. But at that time we were so small as to be insignificant. We did not even have a booth in the exhibit hall.
Back to Bran Ferren and his “fire” connection – he went on to say, “Its fire because human beings are the only story telling creature and this will fundamentally change the way we tell each other stories.” It hit me like nothing I had ever heard. That is why when I tell you this story here now it is as clear to me as it was then.
Can you think of a few billion dollar ways he was right?
Here is my short list -
- Google – where we re-search for what we don’t know or would like to know more
- Facebook – how do families and friends tell each other stories? post a photo, write a caption and we all tell the micro stories of our lives. I posted a photo with caption of a giant spider I killed in my apartment in Singapore yesterday … there were 10 comments from my children, high school friends and business associated.
- Twitter – obviously but in different ways from Facebook, right?
- Blogs – I remember when David Winer predicted that Blogs would supplant newspapers. He was scoffed totally. But today, most major newspapers in the USA are in deep financial trouble because people have internet based Blog ways to get their news more efficiently, lower cost and faster.
- iTunes – music is a way we share stories … just listen to Kathy Mattea, Harry Chapin or even the Beatles but in 1994 no one was listening to Bran and using his insight to go invent iTunes
- YouTube – a site where we share our videos no matter how ridiculous
There are so many done but probably still many more to go. Are you listening yet?
PS … here is a fun video on “The Big Picture”
Topics: Essays, Green Perspectives, Investing, Personal Stories, Singapore Incubator, Spiritual Threads, StartUp Ideas | No Comments »
Startups – Focus on the Business Model
By Frank | May 22, 2010
Small World Group Incubator is now up and running in Singapore. As we go about our formation actions, we keep reminding ourselves that these “businesses” we are starting up are going to have to really discover their own functioning business model during their first year if possible.
So often in Universities and other places the focus is on writing a good business plan. But that is often quite futile in hindsight. Plans are for when the business has established customers, long term relationships and so when a plan is executed it will produce an agreed upon result typically between the customers and the company.
But in a startup, you don’t have customers you have “potential customers” and that is very different. A startup cannot offer their first customers the same things that are offered by others that is the road to disaster. Existing companies already compete on that basis. What they must offer is something radically new and better. Better performance, better reliability, better sales model …
And that is most often discovered as a part of the process, it is typically not something that is planned. Planning is still important before starting up but only so far as it guides efficient first steps but the plans must allow for pivots in direction based on customer feedback or product development unexpected outcomes.
The best version of this I have ever seen is in the following video by Steven Blank – watch it here.
Be patient, about 15 minutes into the talk he has set you for his take on business plans.
After you watch that, then take a look at his Blog … here is a particularly interesting post.
All this resonates with me and it well describes how we are approaching the Incubator over here in Singapore.
Topics: Essays, Investing, Singapore Incubator, StartUp Ideas, Uncategorized | No Comments »
Big Picture
By Frank | May 20, 2010
Every once in a while, there is something on the web that knocks my socks off.
As many of the readers of this Weblog know, I was once an astronomer; my PhD is in that field from the University of Virginia. During that time, I studied the structure of spiral galaxies (1), (2), (3) like our own Milky Way.
Our galaxy is a disk of stars with a very weak, perhaps only 5% mass enhancement in a spiral pattern. Gravitational disks are susceptible to such modes but such a mass enhancement if only that would not give the spirals such a striking and beautiful appearance. What makes the spiral pattern so very visible is the fact that with only such a small mass variation across the disk of the galaxy, the gas in the galaxy between the stars gets whipped into a spiral shock wave pattern. As the gas goes through this shock wave clumps of gas get compressed sufficiently that single and groups of stars are born in a spiral pattern. Most of the new star formation in these galaxies happens this way.
Stars that are born this way can have various sized from 2-3x bigger than our sun to perhaps only 60% the size of our sun. Small stars burn very dimly,are more reddish in color and live VERY long times compared to our sun but big stars burn blue, are very bright and live very short times compared to our sun. The largest stars have lives of perhaps only 1,000,000 years compared to the expected life of our sun which is 10,000,000,000 years. So these young bright blue stars are essentially born and die in almost the same place.
In a spiral pattern. So it is these big bright blue stars that give the spiral galaxies their striking visual appearance.
Seeing our own galaxy’s spiral pattern is tough because we live (our sun’s position) in the galactic plane so we see the spiral edge on and not from the face.
One more point about the blue stars … when they die, the blow up in an event known as a supernova and for a short period of time during the explosion they burn with more light than all of the 200,000,000,000 other stars in the galaxy. Wow. After the supernova dims down that explosive event can be seen as an expanding bubble of gas in our galaxy. As these bubbles cool they can be quite visible in the infrared portions of the light spectrum. And that is the end of this lecture.
Now for the striking picture. If you got here –> http://www.chromoscope.net/
This shows what we can see from earth of our galaxy in various colors of light. If you move the slider from the starting “visual” position to Hydrogen Alpha you can see the gas in our galaxy and then you see many gigantic bubbles. Each of these is the product of a supernova that happened some millions of years ago!
Enjoy!
Topics: Essays, Optical Technology, Personal Stories | No Comments »
Life and Thought
By Frank | May 10, 2010
Time for a thinking piece. If you don’t like mushy stuff, skip this one.
Several people I know well have passed on in the last few months. And times like that make you reflect on their lives and your own.
I also urge you to reflect on how each of us must work to live a life well. It is the most amazing and precious gift in the universe. Life. The fact that our thoughts can change matter is very deep. We think and the earth changes even now at the macro level (= climate change) but still it is thought that moves chemicals at the most minute level and eventually my fingers move and type this to you. What about that?
Lew Aronson was Finisar’s Chief Scientist. He had cancer for about 8 years, and it was through his thinking that he lasted so long. He learned all he could about his disease and even started a foundation to find a cure. It was a rare form of cancer so not much was known. Normally people have a couple of years but Lew lived to see much of his children’s growth years.
During most of that time, Lew continued inventing. He was the father of the SFP+ and laserwire to name 2 current products that are still in prime production and that carry a significant amount of the Internet’s traffic today. His thoughts now embodied in to products bring you this web page, at least for some of you. His thoughts.
Not convinced?
OK then listen to the astronomer … there is no body in the known universe that looks like earth at night. Lit up, showing our coastlines and major cities and major highways. We thought and we invented and we built and we tore down and built again … and it can be seen today from VERY far away. We thought … and evolved.
So it is with the thoughts that a Grandmother or Dad shared with you that are no longer here. They have made you some of what you are today. Maybe a bit taller, smarter or more joyous or a love for a certain kind of food, sport or music. They thought and yet is you who still act out the outcome of those thoughts. Are they dead if that thought still drives you?
And so Dean and I hope it will be with the Singapore Incubator we have started. We are thinking how to make a 1% difference in our world. We are working on crazy ideas to bring power and elements of modern life to the poorest of people. We are helping to start companies that will use the sun’s heat to make more efficient air conditioning. But through it all it is our thoughts that will make the difference and the thoughts of those who we encourage to work with us to start these companies.
Think and live … guess that is the point.
Now back to our regularly scheduled programming.
Frank
Topics: Essays, Personal Stories, Spiritual Threads | No Comments »
Getting into Business
By Frank | April 11, 2010
A little remembered episode of my past is that I started a company called Netek in 1984. The “plan”, which was formally written down, was essentially the same as that of Finisar.
Except. That the plan called for us to invent, design, develop, manufacture and sell products for fiber optic network that we were certain that were needed by the market. But our own vision was not tempered by the key point of view – that of those who would be our customers. Well I was subsequently fired from that company … under circumstances that were not exactly right, but I have always maintained that I should have been fired for not being a very competent CEO.
When I started Finisar, we had sales our first month and every subsequent month of our now 20 year existence. Our first year we had sales of $350K, next year was $600K and so on. There were some downs but generally we doubled our sales each year for the next 10 years. Key point was that we had sales and by inference, we had customers from the very beginning. We started out doing contract engineering for other companies with ideas. We built a scuba diving computer for Tekna, a pool controller for FAFCO, a linear CATV laser transmitter for Wavelength’s lasers and a video on demand demonstration system for Explore Technology.
Another telling of these contracts is that we learned about micro-controllers that became the heart of our digital diagnostics patents from the Tekna and FAFCO projects, we learned about laser modulation and had an early patent on that for CD lasers from Wavelengths collaboration, and we developed our first “transceiver modules” which is the main product family today for Finisar sales to this day. So customer interaction led to much of what Finisar still produces today.
Sometimes it seems not possible to have customers involved in your business so early. One of the key principles of the Small World Group Incubator – the efforts of what we are doing here in Singapore – is that we want each of the companies where we engage to have sales early and to have customers that help define and finance their future. There will have to be different ways for the companies to achieve this goal.
Some may find that they can find customers that want to have their specific requirements be a part of the first products they make. In this case we will work with them to get commitment to fund those specific developments. There may be specific c0-branding that can be done as well so that the customer gains some additional benefits. One of the first companies that we may help has this well underway.
Another way to find a customer early is to agree to use many elements of the final product that you purchase from existing sources. This may limit in some ways the proprietary-ness of the initial product offering but this allows very rapid product development that hopefully can finish early in the startup company’s life and then the product can be delivered to the customer for actual field use. Finisar did this extensively in the early years. We purchased lasers from Rohm, photodiodes from Hamamatsu, high speed integrated circuits from Avantek (purchased by HP) and so forth. Our main value was weaving these existing technologies from different fields of use into a single product for our customers.
In this same way, clean tech companies started inside the Small World Group Incubator we hope can purchase some system elements from the USA, China, Japan and Europe can contribute some system elements and our companies can weave new thoughtful solutions by for markets and customers. And as they engage with these rapid developed platforms they can substitute new IP and elements for existing ones. Key here is that a system purchased by a customer sets known price points, establishes product gross margins and even the company operating model. By doing this early, the start up company starts out life as a business with customers, revenue and all of the things that those elements require.
We want our startups to get into business early and to stay that way. We have not seen a technology or idea that is not amenable to this approach.
Contact us so that we can talk to you or your group about this.
Topics: Essays, Investing, Personal Stories, Singapore Incubator, StartUp Ideas | No Comments »
Watching a Team Win
By Frank | April 3, 2010
Those of you who read this Blog may not know that I graduated from Butler University. Yes the same Butler that is now in the NCAA Basketball championship game. All of the other schools have 10,000 students or more (typically sizes are more than 20,000 students) but Butler has only 4,000. And more importantly the players for this scrappy team all generally graduate; they are math, pharmacy, accounting majors so they graduate with real and first rate college bachelors degrees.
Now what makes watching these games so enjoyable in addition to the fact I attended this place is that this group plays as a team. I may be wrong, but these fellows may not be headed to the NBA, but this weekend is not about the NBA. It is about which team is best. And so far, it has been a tourney to watch just for the Butler team play. They play a slower game, pass to each other, compensate for missed opportunities for one another. And in the end it all adds up to a different game of basketball.
Looking at the brackets it is clear that most of the other winning teams have scored typically 70, 80, even 90 points in their games. Butler has won most of its games by scoring in the low 50s. Patience. Team work. Disrupting the other team’s rhythm. So very different.
One game to go at this point. And the outcome is far from certain. But certainly it will be one worth watching. And if Butler wins, you can watch the movie in 25 years that sensationalizes this cinderella moment that Tuesday you can see live.
Enjoy!
Topics: Essays, Personal Stories | No Comments »
Singapore Updates
By Frank | March 10, 2010
Things are settling in for SWG in Singapore.
While we still do not have final documents from the National Research Foundation, we are proceeding with a couple of early term sheets and engaged nicely with perhaps 4-5 groups who we hope will come to full fruition.
There is a small interview on a Singapore website that also makes our case.
A longer PodCast will also be online soon and I will post it here too.
We have an office out at Nanyang Technological University (NTU) and it is working out well enough that we may move our living arrangements to be closer to that as well. The apartment is above one of the MRT (subway) stations and it is close to both major Universities as well as groceries, shopping, and more. So perfect for green investors who don’t even own a car over here.
Stay tuned.
Topics: Essays, Investing, Singapore Incubator | 2 Comments »
New Beginning
By Frank | February 21, 2010
Over the last few years, this website has contained the musings and discussions relating to my evolution of my focus from just Finisar and optical communications towards a broader horizon – clean tech and green investing. I was in sync with the overall trends of high tech culture in this step.
Over the last 7 months I have been working to start an incubator focused on clean tech, optical systems and novel materials – all in partnership with the Singapore government. On December 30, 2009, Small World Group was notified that we were one of the Incubator proposals that has been accepted by the government.
The ramifications of this are multiple -
- first of all it means that I will be spending 4 weeks out of every 6 in Singapore; as a corollary, when I am in the USA the time there always involves travel to both Indiana (home) and California (business) as well as time visiting my children who live all over! I am once again signed up for too much travel; if you want to reach me, you can see my location calendar here.
- SWG now has 2 principals – myself and Dean Haritos. Dean’s background is Cal Tech (BS), Stanford (MS), HP – Finisar – Infinera in terms of big corporations and Cloudbreak Software as a startup company. Dean is a master of project planning and execution. He is also a cancer survivor who works with people diagnosed with cancer – he maintains a website “just past infinity” for this purpose.
- Small World Group Incubator is now a Pte LTD company in Singapore. We began operations in early January and are making progress towards funding our first company. The scheme here allows us to invest up to $88K and at that limit the Singapore National Research Foundation (NRF) gives the company a convertible loan of $500K where the SWG Incubator owns the right to convert the loan at its own decision for up to 3 years after the company is founded. More is available about the NRF TIS scheme (1), (2), (3).
- In Singapore, we have an entrepreneurial ecosystem that is rich in technical talent as well as rich in Institutes and Universities that have state of the art equipment. Also we find there is a real focus on transforming the country from its diminishing manufacturing base to one where ideas, designs and product development are needed to build the new future.
We hope you will go to the Incubator tab and explore our activities there!
Topics: Uncategorized | No Comments »
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