But in a real sense while we live in just one universe, in a galaxy like this about 2/3 of the way out from the center, in a rather stress free neighborhood.

Right now we realize our universe is quite a bit smaller.  Except for the lunar landings more than 40 years ago, all of us live here on this “small blue marble”.  And that is something that we all have never really owned.

This past year we all failed to pass climate change legislation because some of us wanted things different from the others and in the end we could not agree.  So we settled for virtually nothing.

The problem is, that because it is one home for us all, even if many agree to strongly limit CO2 emissions but one decides to go on a crash diet of burning coal, then we are all still screwed.  What struck me this morning is that this is a principle that covers so many more areas that we first may suspect.  And it changes millennial old paradigms that we have enshrined in our religions and our values.

Here are some more examples taken from recent headlines -

• “The End of Antibiotics” is an article published online by Time Magazine.  In it states that “tens of millions of pounds” [of antibiotics] are used in animal feed stock to allow them to fatten up better and on schedule.  It is the massive over use of these miracle drugs that is causing, no driving the evolution of bacteria to become more immune to this type of treatment.  Europe ban such use some time ago but the USA refused to go along.  Now I suspect that the USA argument is that China, Mexico, Brazil, India also don’t do this and so why should they.  But because of the wholesale use of antibiotics … even when not specifically required … continues this causes the world use of this system to fail.
• The case for coal vrs nuclear vrs renewable energy has the same structure.  Why should the USA change its habits when we have been suffering for using too much foreign oil and now we are converting to using our own resource – coal – but our use is slowly raising the temperature of the planet every day.  Moreover, the same argument applies to others as well.  China has little petroleum but plenty of coal and they need new energy to come on line steadily.
• And finally the same thing applies to religion.  Each of the major western religious traditions (and here I will include Islam) have roots in a time when one way to strengthen your cause was to make sure you annihilated your enemies; these traditions teach that adherents are blessed and that outsiders are not.  And in the end this translates to them being less than human.  Not so long ago in terms of human social evolution, say 200 years, our ability to take this stance and inflict damage on those who disagree with us was limited to relatively short ranges.  But today for most groups it is planet wide.

So the simple conclusion of this essay is to ask each of you – How do we all gain some universal respect for one another and how to do we create empowered social structures to help implement world wide safeguards to protect us, our universe and all of the others who share in this gift of life?

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.

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”

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.

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!

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

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.

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!

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.