I sat down with digital director of StartupWeek Sydney, Ian Lyons, to chat about breaking into the business of emerging tech as a developer and entrepreneur. Ian is an incredibly insightful guy and had fantastic insights and ideas to share. If you’re looking for opportunities to get into emerging tech, this is for you.
For more info on StartupWeek Sydney, including slides and photos from the event, head to the StartupWeek Sydney website.
If you’re more of a reader than a listener, I’ve also got a transcription of our discussion below:
Patrick: Hello, everybody. My name is Patrick Catanzariti. I run Dev Diner and I am here today with Ian Lyons who is going to tell me all about the wonderful world of technology that he sees every day. He’s actually a man with a lot of ideas and a very inspired man actually. I’d spent a lot of time speaking to him. We’d already been speaking for a half an hour before the interview was even begun. He’s a man with many ideas and I think he might be very useful for people to listen to and hear his thoughts if you’re out there trying to work out what you can do in the new technology space. If you need a bit of guidance or thoughts, hopefully he will be able to help. Hello again.
Ian: Hi, Patrick. Thank you.
To start with, tell us a bit about yourself and your work in the industry because you’ve had a lot of experience. For those who don’t know you yet, just a bit about who you are, where you’ve come from.
I started in technology pretty young. I think I was around eight or nine years old. Our first PC was an Exidy Sorcerer from 1979.
I’m really impressed somebody named a PC “Sorcerer”. That already sounds good.
They have one of the most epic marketing shots I’ve ever seen. It’s a guy carrying this big desktop around and trying to pick up a university girl who’s wearing clogs. I recommend you Google image search “Exidy Sorcerer”. It’s spectacular.
That touches on a big point for me. I’ve had a real love-hate relationship with technology. I guess like many people listening, I’ve got an aptitude for technology but I also kinda like women… and those two never met.
Ian Lyons from StartupWeek Sydney
Thirty years ago, thirty-five years ago, they were far, far apart. I had this love-hate relationship with it. I’ve also enjoyed an amazingly diverse career because of my understanding of technology. I remember I used to be always the youngest person in the room when something important was being discussed in a business context because at least I had that insight in technology. My willingness to bridge the understanding from something highly technical to how it’s applicable to society or a business, that got me in the room. Now I find myself consistently the oldest person in the room. I’m still in the room which I’m happy about but I think there’s something there as well for older developers, and it’s something I certainly look for, that life experience and the ability to empathise with large groups of people is critical. It’s something that you just have to develop throughout your life experience time and the older you are, hopefully the more empathy you have and that’s incredibly valuable.
Just touching on what I think innovation is and I think it’s misunderstood a lot of the time. For me, it’s solving hard problems that deserve to get solved. A great place to start is just solving the hard problems that you encounter in your own life and then figuring out whether there’s a market for that, whether other people are struggling as well with the same sorts of things.
I’ve never really listened to anything limiting in my career, being told, “No, absolutely not.” When I wanted to go back to Europe and work throughout Europe, I was working for Mars Foods here in Australia and they were rolling out the first office networks on the Digital Equipment Corporation. It was called Pathworks. There was still token-ring and the Ethernet was just coming in. I was recommended to someone in the London office for Mars and I went out for just a chat and I realised they were offering me the job.
Excellent.
That’s what happens internally. I said, “Look, I really want to travel.” My manager said, “Look, there’s absolutely no scope for travel in this. None, none.” So I started the job. It was interesting. Within two weeks, I was on a plane to Paris. I worked my way through Western Europe, Eastern Europe and I spent nine months in Russia as well.
Sounds so good.
It was great because the problem that was worth solving is that all of the IT managers in all the different countries were having trouble implementing our system, so I simply asked the question, “Look, would it help you if I came out and sort of worked you through it?” “Yeah, that would be great.” “Would you pay for it?” “Yeah, of course, of course.”
Suddenly I’m the one in from the team who’s actually very customer-facing, have a better understanding of where the challenges are and was able to bring that back to the dev team so that everyone’s job became easier.
This is something I say to students who think the approach is to submit a résumé. Let’s think about a résumé from the perspective of someone who has to read résumés. Your résumé is not the only one. Yours is on a pile of twenty or thirty other résumés and the problem that causes for that person is that it’s keeping them from what they’d rather be doing which is playing with their kids or watching a TV show or doing anything else. What they actually have to do is filter out the crap from the truth, times thirty, and your résumé is yet another one on those piles and so it might be five to ten minutes of extra work for that person. You’re another problem in their life.
Now let’s contrast this with someone who really becomes clear on, say, chooses six companies that you really want to work with and why. Then tune into the things that the people within those companies are talking about. The problems. They might have a blog, they might have a Twitter account, they might have a LinkedIn profile that is active or not active. Being able to tune into the things that they’re talking about and then applying your skills to solving those problems.
If your first approach to someone senior at a company is, “Hey, I read this thing you were talking about, trying to reduce friction in payments for customers. I’ve done this and this, and I think if we took this approach, we could actually address this issue.” The difference between those two approaches, one is a problem.
The other one, your initial approach is solving a hard problem. They will create a job for you. There’s no doubt.
Yeah. Genius.
I’ve spoken to so many business owners about this and they go, “Yes, there is a job waiting for someone who’s making our life easier” versus someone who’s going to be saying, “Oh, what do I do next? What do I do next? What do I do next?” There is a massive amount of work there. The way that it’s worked for me is I’m very curious about things. I’ll investigate. I’ll ask questions. I’ll apply my knowledge to things and before I know it, I’m being asked too, “Well, what’s your consulting rate?”
I’ve actually got a really good comeback for that now. I look them in the eye and I say, “Look, don’t worry, I’m reassuringly expensive.” Nervous laughter always ensues but it’s worked out really well so far, especially because I can get a money-back guarantee after a certain period. I like to get my clients to feel that I’ve been very generous with my time, my knowledge. They’re paying a lot but they’re also getting the value out of it as well.
Yeah, interesting.
That’s my work in the industry. I’ve been lucky enough to work with some large brands globally. Mars took me, I found myself on the tarmac of Vladivostok International Airport without my passport. I stopped feeling my toes about twenty minutes ago because it’s minus thirty-two degrees and I have to get one and a half million dollars worth of computer equipment off a private jet that we chartered from Moscow. I was handed ten thousand dollars US cash to bribe the guys and everyone just leaves. I’m going, “Yeah, okay, if anyone knows how much I’ve got in my breast pocket, I’m dead.” I managed to get it all off the plane for four hundred dollars. I’m very, very proud of that because the Russians in Moscow paid them fifteen hundred dollars to get it on the plane.
I’ve been very lucky. I worked at a startup as well in Los Angeles in 2000. It was a publishing startup focusing on e-business. We published physical magazines. We ran events. We moved to Los Angeles, and four months later, the tech crash happened, so having to readjust to a new reality is something that I’ve had a bit of experience in. We focused on events. We were running events in London, New York, San Francisco. About a thousand people, a hot ticket item. Then September 11 decimated that business for everybody, so again having to readjust to what the market wanted was something we had to figure out quickly.
The first thing I do is put in a listening platform, so analytics, because it’s always been obvious to me, to be able to look at a data set and to have a human story, and I’ve learned over time that it’s really important to start with that singular human story that people can understand and empathise with. When I say people, I’m talking specifically about the people who can actually shift resource allocation to make a difference, so usually it’s at the boardroom table. Those people need to understand, to feel what someone else is feeling, i.e. a customer, and then being motivated to change things even if it’s expensive to change things.
Which is a very tough thing to attempt to do.
You never, ever want to start with the statistics, but if you start with a singular human story that someone either feels good about or usually bad about, and then you back it up with the statistics. You tell someone about this horrible experience this customer’s had. You say, “By the way, that represented twenty-five percent of our customers last month.”
“Based on very conservative numbers, that was half a million dollars revenue that not only went begging, they’re not going to come back to us.”
Yeah, that tells the story perfectly and then they know to change!
That shifts people. Having analytics that allows you to translate it into a singular human story that is still relevant to the company. That’s the thing. I never knew why, it was obvious to me, but not obvious to everyone else until about two years ago. Case Western University did some FMRI research on brains. It turns out I’ve got a defective brain.
Or a superhuman brain which is focused better.
No, it’s actually a lack of focus. That was interesting.
Really?
There are two brain pathways, one that is activated for analytical thought and the other one is activated for empathic thought, and they’re mutually exclusive. There’s a chemical that suppresses one or the other depending on our need. Evolutionarily, we’ve never had to do both at the same time. Now if you have a defective brain and one of the defects is ADHD, that chemical suppressant isn’t self-suppressed, so I can switch between looking at a spreadsheet and understanding what someone went through behind those numbers. But most people can’t. I’m medicated now. When I’m medicated, it’s very useful for me to focus, but it’s not easy for me to do that either.
I sort of balance it. If anyone’s listening and you suspect you’ve got ADHD, it’s a real insight because most people don’t have the ability to do both of these things at the same time.
There’s an opportunity there, yeah.
A huge opportunity, especially if you’re in technology and you’re sitting on massive amounts of data, translating that into “Why give a shit?” is really important and it’s such a massive opportunity to change the world for good. You can torture data into telling you anything you want but if you have the ability of really understanding and empathising with the people behind what the data’s telling you, you have such a powerful mechanism to then share it with others who have the resources. You will be invited back again and again and again to do that.
Yeah. It’s a very, incredibly valuable skill to be able to go through and do that with the data, because most people find data very scary or just overwhelming and something they just want somebody else to deal with. Good that you can be the somebody else, but also somebody else who’s actually delivering results and seeing the right things in that data rather than just, “Oh, I’ll give you another report and I’ll add some graphs to it and there you go. The data is analysed.”
No board needs yet another forty-page report. What they want to see is the first page of what to do and thirty-nine other pages backing that up if they want to check it out. You still have to do the work, but trust me, all they want is five minutes from you on what to do for the next quarter. As you build up that trust, it’s literally five minutes and then they can worry about other things, and that’s incredibly valuable as well.
Excellent. Okay. That’s a really good background on everything. As everybody listening, I’m sure can tell, Ian’s done a lot of stuff, just in general. One of the most recent things that you were involved in was the Startup Week in Sydney. Tell us, how did it go, what was your involvement and yeah, what did you see, what was the most exciting highlights, all that sort of stuff?
Great. The opportunities I saw for Startup Week was to bring together the various start-up communities initially around Sydney. There are about fifty or sixty of them. They’ve been doing lots of great work but pretty much from an outsider’s perspective in isolation, so if I was a corporate or government and I wanted to interface with a startup community, there wasn’t a single interface point. That was the opportunity I saw together with the way the zeitgeist has moved. Startups and entrepreneurs are certainly the flavour of the month now for politicians, so they’re one of the big new entrants that’s looking for an interface. Traditional companies are also looking for how to utilise some of the startup methodologies like lean startup and better listening and being more customer centric, human-centered design. Bringing together these communities, I was about to say under one umbrella, and that’s exactly the opposite of what we do. I don’t like being controlled. I know no one else likes to be controlled.
So, the way we’ve always approached this is that Startup Sydney is a support organisation. It’s not for profit, and it supports these communities in achieving the outcomes that they’re hoping to achieve. One of the things we can do as a single entity is make it easier for corporates to provide sponsorship dollars, to take some government money, licence things like the mobile app which was directed at increasing engagement, giving people a voice.
It was a very good app.
Yeah, there were a number of events where it worked really, really well, and we’ll talk a bit more about that. Then on an ongoing basis, funnelling resources to those communities to support them but also giving a much easier entry point to those new entrants. Now, there were sixty-five events run across the week. We didn’t organise many events at all. It was the community partners that did, and it’s really, really important to know.
What we did was we put a website together that brought it all together. We encouraged people to shift events into the week, to put on new events. We supported them with marketing. If they didn’t have RSVP mechanisms or email marketing, we provided that. Also, we licensed the app which was otherwise quite expensive and made it available to them. We didn’t mandate any of this stuff, but if you wanted to use it, you could. That’s going to be our approach going forward. Some of the landmark events… one was Everything IoT. It was positioned as the seminal big IoT conference in Australia. It was run by a guy called Eitan Bienstock who is Director of Global Growth at ATP Innovations. He had ten plus years of Intel Capital in San Francisco. He’s from Israel. He has many connections to the VC and startup community in Israel and has run events with them before. His idea was to have half the room full of corporates who are starting to become aware about the opportunities around IoT. Innovators, developers as well as startups who are actually working in IoT, so if you look to the left and you look to the right, you’re sitting next to someone who’s from a different world, but you work together and you can do amazing things.
From my perspective, the opportunity for Australia in IoT is to be the proving ground for the world. We’ve done this many times, similar to the way that Mars rolled out office networks first in Australia in the late ’80s, early ’90s. We’re a relatively small country, twenty-five million people fairly densely packed together in cities. We’re a Western society so we’re very similar to large markets overseas. The risk point is very much lower, so test things here before you roll them out overseas, I think should continue to be our sort of… What’s it called? Basically we should be calling to the world to come here and test things that otherwise would be too risky or would take too long. Certainly for IoT there are massive opportunities. Yeah, I’m surprised that 3D Robotics didn’t spend more of its seed funding in Australia testing drones because we have a much better regulatory framework than the FAA is providing.
Yep, so it makes more sense just to do it here.
We have some of the most mechanised farming in the world because our farms are so large so that the machines on the ground are already connected. You can create an entire technical ecosystem from the sky down to the ground and you can manage farming much, much more efficiently. Why not come to Australia to do that?
Yeah. That makes sense.
Yeah, that was a huge one. There was immense interest in the final event of last week, or the week before now, which was blockchain. The thing that surprised me was that we had a number of lawyers in the room, and this is a big tip for people. I didn’t understand why there were so many lawyers but I could see that they were there through the app because when people register, you register your company and your title. It was up to thirty percent of the room were lawyers… Why? They’re not known to be technically savvy or early adopters, so I went and spoke to one of them, and he told them that their clients ask them about blockchain. If they say, “We don’t know” their client goes looking for another law firm because the clients trust their law firm to understand the regulatory environment, to understand the risks and opportunities and “I don’t know” is not a valid answer. You lose the account. When the account is a big bank…
That’s really bad, yeah.
Massive impact. The opposite of that is if you position yourself as the law firm who knows about this stuff, you win those clients. That screams to me, and this is all coming out of a data empathy perspective. “We need to put on more events, we need to market it to law firms and we need to charge what they will bear, because it’s highly valuable.”
Yeah, they’re all looking for that knowledge.
A big part of the funding for blockchain events might come from the legal profession and that cross-subsidises access to entrepreneurs who need to be in the room as well to actually make it all work. So that was very exciting, and the level of discourse was amazing. Just getting back to the app, I wanted to hear from the people who don’t put their hand up. They are the ones who are quiet, incredibly thoughtful. My hypothesis was that if we gave them a voice, the rest of the room could up-vote, just like Reddit, they could up-vote that question because it was a great question. Then therefore the zeitgeist in the room directs the conversation. When that happens, that’s exciting, and it happened in IoT.
There was a panel of selected startups and it was chaired by Ian Gardiner from AWS. Mark Pesce, who was in the audience, asked the question, “Why doesn’t Australia have a hardware accelerator? What would it take for this to happen?” Very quickly, we saw seven up-votes on that question from the audience. There was a bit of a conversation that started. It was clear that he had nailed that question.
I walked up to Ian, showed him my phone, he looked at it, nodded and then asked the question. As soon as he did, there was actually an audible cheer from the audience. But it doesn’t stop there. Cisco was in the room. Kevin Bloch was a speaker in the morning. He, to his credit, stayed the whole day and engaged. Five minutes after that question was asked, he stood up and he said, “Okay, I am here as Cisco now. What do we need to do to make this happen?”
Fantastic.
Don’t ask for money. “What else can we do?” It’s progressed quite a bit since then and I think, if it hasn’t already been announced, I’m not going to announce it here. There’s going to be a big announcement from Cisco to enable something around, not necessarily a hardware accelerator but an IoT accelerator because it encompasses a lot more than the hardware. It’s the software. It’s potentially blockchain. It’s a much deeper level of thinking about how we approach this brave new world where algorithms drive more of our physical environment. If we don’t do it carefully, that gets extremely dangerous because we have a rich history of unintended consequences.
Yeah. “Let’s just run in and build something and make lots of money and not really think it through.”
Yeah, yeah, because we, both ourselves as humans are going to be the recipients of an algorithmically driven physical world but also our environment as well, so we don’t want to accidentally further exacerbate the strain that we’re putting on the ecosystem. Yeah, and I’m talking about the natural ecosystem, so there has to be a lot more thought and a lot more people involved in the development than there currently are. I think it’s far too technically based.
Yeah, yeah. That makes sense. Well then I’m going to jump to a question I was going to ask you later but it actually fits in much better here which is that there is that perception in the IoT that everything I’d want to do in the Internet of Things space is already done, it’s already taken by competitors – Samsung, Google, Apple. They’ve all got home hubs and stuff. I can’t do anything. How am I going to innovate? Do you have any tips for people out there, developers listening who really want to innovate and they like the idea of the Internet of Things, but they don’t know what to do. How do they innovate successfully and make something that will actually work?
We’ll go back to my earlier point around solving hard problems. I know I’ve always been an early adopter. Most of my lighting in my apartment is LED and Arduino controlled. I’ve got several Philips hues. I’ve got a Plex media center. I’ve even got that Ambilight concept behind my plasma screen because it makes a big difference but here’s the thing. None of them are connected in a way that makes sense to me as a human. When you think through the contexts, sometimes I want my environment to change my mood if I’ve had a shitty day at work. Sometimes I want my environment to support my mood or to enhance my mood. I love music. I really like music videos and I’ve downloaded a lot that’s available but I find the curation of that very, very time consuming. Music curation exists. Music video curation does not exist. Music video curation interfaced with the environment, like lighting, air conditioning… that doesn’t exist at all. How you get these systems talking together isn’t being done well, I’ve found. I’ve not found anything that works well.
I think a lot of people would agree.
There are a lot of opportunities in that. Even, yeah, just really crazy things. I like how iTunes will go across my entire music collection and normalise the volume so one thing’s not crazy louder than everything else.
That literally does not exist in music videos, so I’m always lunging for the remote control to change things. Here’s another just really stupid, stupid example. I still need infrared to turn my TV on and off. It does have HDMI and it does have something that’s called CEC so you can control power over HDMI and the thing’s got Wi-Fi, Ethernet…
It has all the technology.
But I can’t… I can turn it off via Wi-Fi, I can’t turn it on. So I have to find an infrared remote and point it at the screen to do this.
Which is ridiculous, yeah.
It’s stupid!
So, really simple things that make human lives better, I think, are huge opportunities that are not being addressed very well at the moment. You look at the Nest thermostat and I have yet to see a blog post for how to implement that in Australia. From what I’ve understood, HVAC systems in the US are fairly standardised and they’re fairly simple, whereas the air-conditioning systems here are much more complex. It’s very difficult to integrate Nest into an Australian system, but if you can figure it out…
You can be the one.
… you will get a lot of early adopters paying you to do this. When people come and see our home entertainment system, I guess the need for me, and I know I’m a subset and very much an early adopter, is – I hate having my time and attention abused by an advertiser who knows nothing about me.
This happened to us recently. We went to Fitness First, which I hate and I won’t go back again. They play music videos except when they’re playing ads to pad their profit margins and they were at a much louder volume, shoving feminine incontinence products at me.
Finally. You’ve been waiting for so long to be told about this while you’re exercising now.
My anger around that is largely driven by my understanding of technology and knowing that I can control my media consumption completely now. When I’m in a situation where I can’t, it’s frustrating for me, but I think as soon as you’re aware of how easily you can control your environment through technology, you don’t go back.
It’s true.
It’s just like the faster Internet access speed you experience, that becomes your set point. It’s hard to go down from there.
Yeah. No way you’re going back from that.
I think more and more people will experience this and more and more people will not want to go back, and that’s a big opportunity around IoT. How can I have an environment that supports me as a human?
Yeah, and you can have tons of different environments too, so it’s literally, “So one of the environments that you thought you would do has already been done? Then find a different one, because there are so many places that people are using tons of technology or could be using technology.”
Awesome. Here’s a big opportunity. How do you, what’s the right word, two people in a room. Who wins?
It’s true.
And how do you compromise? Dispute resolution in the physical space when everything is controlled by algorithms. How do you do that? That’s an interesting one.
Yeah. That’s a very good question too.
I guess that’s a nice segue into something that I’ve been talking about for a little while. It’s the idea of having a digital butler. A digital agent’s the same thing but I actually like the nuance around “butler” because it’s something that we understand in popular culture. We’ve seen it in movies. A butler is there to work for you in any context. They shield you from annoyances. They answer the door and if it’s not going to be something you’re interested in, they turn them away.
They understand the different contexts within which you operate. There’s a family context, there’s a work context, a government context. They understand your preferences explicitly and implicitly. When you map technology onto this, you can have your mobile phone today feeding implicit information about you, so where you are, your movements. Your explicit preferences can also be fed in. It becomes a very intelligent interaction. Your butler can ask you smart questions in the right context at the right time and it becomes actually pleasurable to increase the knowledge this butler has about you because the payback is immediately obvious and really critically, I believe we will pay for our own butlers directly or indirectly, it doesn’t matter, but the financial obligation of whose interest this works in becomes very, very clear.
Yeah. You don’t want to have a butler whose financial interest is not you because then just that means that they’re not going to be always in your interest because they’re clearly in somebody else’s interest.
Exactly. Google should not be trusted to do this. Facebook should not be trusted to do this. No other publisher should be trusted to do this.
It makes sense.
When you rest control over your data… and no bank should be trusted to do this either. Your butler should. Your butler is tasked with interfacing into the various marketplaces in your interest. If you’re shopping around for a loan, your butler will disclose to the marketplace anonymous information that has also been third-party validated by your bank.
“This person does have the payment history that suggests a good credit. This person does have this amount of money in their bank account.” But it’s all intermediated by these agents that do things with the minimum amount of data sharing required to achieve the outcome.
So I think brand in the future is going to be much more around how much do you trust this organisation with what level of information, and it can become as simple as a slider of, “Yeah, I really trust these guys a lot and I’m happy to share a lot of information proactively,” or “No, this is the minimum amount.” So, I envisage the fairly near future where every time you change address, your butler already knows you’re about to change address and they present to you a report that says, “Okay, I’ve updated these entities,” Which is the high-trust relationship and the transactional arrangement. These ones, they were important a few years ago, but I suspect they’re less important now, so you get to choose.
Yeah, that would be so good.
These ones, no, they’re just going to fall off because they haven’t maintained a trusted relationship for whatever reason.
Increasing, at a sort of more prosaic example, at least in the real world, is when I walk into a café, through my phone as the technology mechanism, I want to it proactively share two things when it realises I’m inside a café for long enough. I want it to share my first name and my coffee preference with the point of sale system. In return, I want to get two things. One is the price of the coffee and the estimated time it’s going to take.
Then my phone buzzes in my pocket. The first time I take it out, in the lock screen, there’s the price. Three dollars fifty. It’s going to take three minutes. I press a button to enable that transaction to happen. It happens in the background. I sit down and start reading the paper. The next thing I hear is, “Ian, your coffee is ready” and that’s when I have an interaction with the barista. But the payment’s happened, I am part of that payment process, I’ve authorised it. That’s a critical thing for me. That’s it. They don’t need to know more information than that.
Helps me, helps the queue so I’m not waiting around aimlessly, makes everything a bit more efficient. When you create these experiences across people’s lives, it gets pretty interesting.
Yeah. That sounds fantastic too. Cool, and that should be good food for thought for people out there and there is actually plenty that you can do out there. Actually, I like the idea of having a digital butler I’ve considered making something similar multiple times so one day somebody should do it if I don’t get there first!
There’s a lot of infrastructure that needs to be put in place, things like federated log in, federated identity, third-party trust… You could potentially give a lot of transparency to various contexts.
One of the things that really irritates me is this simplistic notion of authority or reputation. A Klout Score is pretty meaningless because we all operate in different contexts. Find a context that matters to people and enable visibility, interaction. I’m sure there are lots of hardware tools. I can easily see an augmented reality future where the first thing is put people’s names above them, above their heads, yeah, just to make it easier to interact as a human being.
Nobody will ever forget my name again.
Then within the context, where we met at Web Directions, that’s a really interesting context. So, you have potentially development skills that you’re interested in. Or just asking you, “What are you hoping to take away from that two day conference? Is it a job? Is it finding someone else who is interested in a similar thing? Is it a developer, having an augmented reality thing?”
But it has to be done with permission. I loved your post about facial recognition.
Thank you.
Facial recognition has been around for ages. It’s called the store keeper or the owner of the store. They’ve been recognising them for ages.
It’s so much easier when you tell humans to recognise faces as well, than technology…
Yeah. Actually on that note, there’s a really cool test. I think it’s done by Scotland Yard. It’s an online test to see if you’re a super recogniser.
Okay, cool.
There’s an initial five-minute one and then a much bigger forty-five minute one, and there’s some people who are just super recognisers.
Excellent. I wish I was one of those people.
Well you can test!
I irritate my partner because I always say, “That person’s …” It’s just easy for me to recognise faces. I guess maybe that’s why faces have always been super important to me. Actually, here’s a big, sort of… not tidbit. I believe if you embody people in the digital world, another term for this is to create a digital twin.
If you put people’s faces against how you’re representing them, it changes everything because A – you recognise patterns very easily. We recognise faces relatively easily. It actually takes an enormous amount of our brain capacity to recognise faces but because so much of our brains are dedicated to facial recognition, it seems really easy and fast. When you see a human, it just triggers that empathic part of our brain to want to help people, I believe. Most people react the same way. They want to be helpful and useful to other human beings. Any chance you get with technology to put a human being forward as a human being, use their face.
Yeah, that’s a very good point.
It’s going to help you. There are lots of times where you’d be happy to log in with your Google Profile or your Twitter profile, sometimes Facebook I guess. I am a dog on Facebook by the way so I don’t know.
So it wouldn’t work for you!
It wouldn’t work for me on Facebook. For the other ones, it absolutely would. That’s what I think worked really well with the app. The onboarding process pulled in your face and I heavily encourage people to attach their face to their profile because I said, “Look. If you’re asking a question and people look around and they think it’s a good question, it makes it easier for them to find you, see what you’re interested in.” Then they approach you from a point of commonality and understanding, so that rapport starts from a much deeper level, and I really wanted to avoid, “Ooh, what do you do? Where are you from?” The people in the room are much smarter than that. You give them tools to quickly see what you’ve been working on and if the conversation can start and move on from there. That’s pretty exciting, yeah.
Yeah, that’s excellent.
Yeah, just always approaching things from a human perspective, I think just there’s enormous safety in it so it avoids doing accidental stupid things. If you’re using a spreadsheet to make decisions, remember you can’t be empathic to the impact of those decisions and that’s led to some really spectacular dumb things in hindsight, but at the time there was no way that person could see the impact. That’s my request. Always put a human face on something you’re about to do and see if it still makes sense.
Yeah, which I think is brilliant. Then leading on from that, talking about augmented reality, and how exciting it is going to be because I know you’re very excited about it because we spoke at length about augmented reality when we first met which is a very good and joint interest of ours.
Yep.
There are a lot of ethical issues which I did cover a bit in my own opinion piece on it, but I’d really be keen to know, from your perspective at least, you mentioned a little bit already that ethical and moral issues exist of getting people’s permission and stuff with facial recognition and all that sort of technology. But augmented reality is coming pretty quickly. The technology’s advancing like crazy and not a lot of people are thinking about the ethical or moral bits yet. Everybody’s trying to be the first in the technology race to get there. What areas do you think, for anybody who’s considering building AR stuff, how should they approach the moral and ethical issues? What issues are out there that they should be considering from your perspective? Is anybody thinking about it that you know?
Yeah. I think you definitely want to avoid the glasshole end point.
Let’s avoid that.
I can’t remember, did Google Glass have a light on when it was recording?
I think it did. I think there was a slight light that would come on. But I think people didn’t really know or weren’t aware enough of it, but still just freaked out.
Yeah, and I think that’s critical is particularly the transition point to let people know when they’re being recorded and I always look to the physical world for inspiration. When someone looks at you and recognises you, you know that’s happened. There’s a point of recognition in their face. During this transition point, at least during this transition point, why not include that in whatever technology you’re building? “You’ve been recognised” is a really good signal to people.
One of the things I did when we launched Solidifer, it was a makerspace in Darlinghurst, we wanted to put one of the new dropcam cameras. I printed out a pair of eyes and put it on top of that because my objective wasn’t to catch people out which is what a lot of security people do these days.
Yeah, to be honest, it would be creepy.
Yeah. I wanted to let people know that they were being recorded so that they would automatically moderate their behaviour, particularly if someone was being nefarious. I have to say, we did actually catch someone stealing something.
No.
I just didn’t want to get potentially sued by it. Otherwise I would have posted it to YouTube. It was the funniest video. It took this little turd ten minutes to steal a wallet. He cased the joint no less than eight times, walked in four times, and by the eight-minute mark, you were just yelling at him, “Just take the wallet already.”
Wow. He’s not a very good thief if he’s taking so long.
No. He obviously didn’t see or didn’t pay much attention to the eyes. There’s a lot of research that shows when you put eyes on a wall, near a bike rack or something, there’s a lot less incidents of theft. Always getting back to what we are familiar with and the signals that we take in as humans, build them in. It gives you a lot of safety. I think also the start point has to be, how is this helpful or useful to another person? If that’s your intention, there’s a lot of safety there because if you make mistakes and it was accidental, one of the unbelievably humane human capacities is for forgiveness.
Just look at Kickstarter. If someone fails but fails well, they keep in contact. They’re genuinely wanting to do the right thing. They will always get up another Kickstarter. If you fail badly, you stop communicating, you will never get up again, because your previous community will make sure that you won’t. There’s that accountability. The capacity for forgiveness is pretty amazing and I’ve always found a lot of safety in – try to be helpful and useful because, yeah, you can stuff up, but everyone knows that you’re not trying to do it for the wrong reasons. Whereas if your north star is a profit motive, there are lots of ways to get derailed.
Yeah, and people will hate your guts if they just see that you were just trying to take advantage of them and you just wanted money or marketing or advertising dollars, and that was it.
Yep, yep, exactly. Yeah.
Usually short-term pressures will lead to bad behaviours. That’s why marketers should never be trusted with retargeting. Where’s the ability to extinguish a purchase intent? It’s not there. It doesn’t exist. Thank you, Google. I can’t go in and say, “Stop selling my purchase intent from two months ago, which has now become embarrassing because you are following me around all these websites and it’s clear to everyone else that I have showed an interest in this.”
Yeah, it’s a valid concern for sure, yeah.
Yeah. One of my clients, this is her example. She was shopping for bras on the weekend. Nothing wrong or embarrassing with that.
No, it’s a usual thing that they need to do.
But Monday morning in a board meeting, every website visited, “Here’s a bra, here’s another bra.”
That’s very important. In these cases, somebody should let Google know.
I actually did let Google know.
What did they say?
There are some very senior, very, very senior analytics people out from the US for a conference and they were on a panel. I asked them, I recounted the story. You know what they did? They laughed. You know who wasn’t laughing? The one woman on the panel.
That’s a very bad look.
When you lack the empathy for how embarrassing that is, it’s really dangerous. Again, I think it always comes back to empathy.
Sorry, I’ve actually lost track of the question. Oh yeah. Augmented reality, yeah. I know that some of the most exciting stuff, Scott O’Brien who’s been working in augmented reality for over a decade now showed me these goggles he can put on in a mind shaft and they’ve got internal positioning systems. You’re in this deep dark hole, but overlaid on that is the directions to the exits and everything else.
That is potentially lifesaving just to have that, yeah.
Awesome, yeah.
Yeah, so I think there are certain use cases where this stuff just is absolutely brilliant. Making forays into social settings, that’s going to be interesting. I do want to see clearly when something’s recording. I do want to see when I’ve been recognised. I think I would like to entrust my digital butler to also interface into the marketplaces and make sure that if I’m being recognised and it’s not in my interest, and something can happen, that requires a legal framework that supports that as well. We need, like I said in my comment to your post, people like Michael Kirby who think so deeply about the social implications. They need to be listened to in speaking about this stuff right now. They might not be technologists, but they certainly know about the impact on how a legal framework can support or hinder things, and writing better laws is super, super critical.
And most take a while to get in place, so the earlier people start thinking about it, then the better off we will be.
Yeah. I’m lucky enough to know Michael Kirby and he’s finished with his High Court appointment now but he still believes he still has his opus in him. So from my perspective, if he helps guide this country and the world into a better legal framework that supports this new wave of technology, that that’s a huge achievement in your lifetime, so I’m going to be encouraging him to get involved.
Definitely do.
What other things with augmented reality? I think there are still massive technical challenges. I think everyone’s massively overselling things.
Yeah, they’re all trying to prove that they are ahead of everybody else and kinda keeping it secret, being like, “Oh, you won’t believe what we can do,” and yeah.
Yeah, and they’re simulating everything and I think most of it’s bullshit. Think about how difficult it is for humans to understand the 3D world and how easy it is to trick our stereoscopic vision and our brains which have been evolved and a lifetime of experience that you’ve had to understand, “Oh, that’s a building. That’s not going to go on to infinity behind this corner.” There’s a lot of contextual intelligence there, and Google’s saying it can do this now with a pair of glasses. Bullshit. It can’t. No way, doing it accurately. I think it’s being oversold at the moment and I think if you… The opportunity is to bring it back into useful reality. What can you augment today that doesn’t require the nth degree of processing power or 3D modelling, VCD or whatever else it is to give value to people?
Take current capabilities and be, “Okay, we are limited but how can we just use what we currently can do without worrying about the limitations impacting things?”
Yeah, simple works really, really well. I think lots of simple steps to complexity that there is an honest opportunity and there are a lot of cost point that you can get to something. Actually, that’s a good point. I’ve just been increasingly playing with experiences on top of the Samsung VR goggles. A friend of mine just launched a VR company. I will try and find his name, but I’ve seen lots of demos and the navigation is always shitty. You’re fiddling with different buttons and then as there are more goggles coming out, it’s hard. What they’ve developed, they say, is basically a gaze point. Their initial use case is real estate. They’ll fly a drone up to each floor, take photos, and then 3D model the building that doesn’t exist yet and then let you do a virtual reality walk-through. Of course it’s hard to walk in virtual reality, so what they’ve done is they start you off at the front door. Then they create subtle gaze points in the distance and all you do is gaze at that point and if it’s long enough, you’ll move to that point. Once you’ve experienced it, it’s the most obvious thing in the world, but getting to obvious is very, very hard. This was the first real estate use case for virtual reality I’ve seen that works really, really well. I think it will help people understand what they’re buying and therefore drive purchase of apartments dramatically.
It sounds like the perfect use case of virtual reality, especially if it’s done well.
Yeah, it’s really subtle, really obvious. You don’t need instructions. When you go to a point where you don’t need instructions…
Then they’re doing it right, yeah.
Yeah, potentially that’s really, really valuable. What’s another one with… Yeah. Whenever you’ve got a consumer level product flooding the market, driving the price down and driving familiarity up, that’s a nice platform to start with. Grab the Samsung goggles and start playing with it. I wouldn’t try and build something from scratch.
My partner has got a project she’s trying to get off the ground to see if she can create an objective measure for concussion because at the moment, it’s always subjective. In any sports where there’s a concussion risk, you need to be able to pull someone off the field.
Ah, yes.
A few months ago, the NFL just paid out three-quarters of a billion dollars in a class action lawsuit.
Wow.
The money is there. Traditionally, in medicine, if you wanted to measure someone’s EEG, it’s a fifty thousand dollar machine and you’re in a lab. If you can put a portable EEG on to a pair of Samsung goggles which are then connected to the Internet, that gets really interesting.
It’s a low price point, one or two thousand dollars. It’s portable. Every sporting club can afford it because their insurance premiums go down because they dramatically lower the risk of someone going back on the field with a concussion and brain damage.
Genius.
Yeah, so that’s an application to consumer tech, bolt things together that haven’t been brought together before. Now look, there’s lots of unknowns. The variability of EEG connections, when you’re sweaty, and you’ve got different hair.
That’s where you build value on the product, you have to be the one who goes and puts the effort into exploring stuff no one has done before.
Yeah, but the potential impact for people who, It’s just that the quality of life, let alone the financial cost, it’s a great thing to pursue. If anyone’s into bio-medicine and has had experience in EEG, drop me a line. I’ll put you in touch with Claire.
I think it’s a great idea. Cool. If you’re listening, get in touch with Ian ASAP.
Let me go to the final question, which is just getting some final thoughts on if you have any other tips for developers in emerging technology, anything that we haven’t covered. Anything that if somebody who is a developer comes up to you and there’s one thing that you really want to make sure that they know, that they’re thinking about while they’re getting into this industry, what would it be?
I think it’s to your point, this mythology that everything’s been done already. Think back to the early days of MP3. It was a pretty crowded market when the iPod came out, very crowded. What no one had done is bring together the five record industry labels at the time. That’s what Jobs was able to do and create a really easy interface. If you wanted to listen to music, iTunes made it easy and the iPod was the hardware device. Everything else was really hard. You had to literally sign up for five different systems to be able to listen to music.
Spend forever putting in CDs, importing everything…
Yep, it might be crowded but there’s a long rich history of the first movers don’t usually win. It’s someone who has an insight into human behaviour and a way of solving a hard problem that wins. I’m not saying you have to be the founder and the winner, but to join a company that’s thinking that way, the tip-offs for me is whether they’re talking about human-centered design, how many times the word “empathy” is used in their blog posts, their website. Are they trying to be helpful and useful, or are they just trying to get a payout day?
Even if you’ve got a lot of things right, like being helpful or useful, a lot of empathy, a great team, there’s no guarantee it’ll work, but I think your chances are a lot better in the long run.
So yeah, don’t think it’s all been done, but find people who you think are doing it for the right reasons.
My mind is just swirling around how difficult it is for an entrepreneur to find a developer, the advice I’d give to those entrepreneurs is have a version one of something. Don’t try and find the technical co-founder without a version one because then everything’s just a bit too amorphous. There’s nothing concrete. If you show a really good developer a shitty version one, it’s really obvious how they can improve it and that’s where your conversation should start.
Yeah. Then they get really excited and then they wanna be like, “Oh no, I want to touch things and change it and fix it because I see that there’s a problem there.”
Maybe that’s a big tip for developers as well. Make sure that if you’re going into business with someone that they’ve got a shitty version one and there’s a clear path for making it better.
That’s a good tip, yeah. Excellent, cool. Thank you for your time, Ian.
Thank you.
It’s been really good. I think we’ve almost hit an hour so that’s a good length for a very in-depth podcast.
There’s actually a ton of stuff I want to still talk to you about, so we might do a follow-up podcast later because…
I’d love to.
You’ve got a lot of stuff that you’re into and so I think there’s much that people can learn from you. For now, that’s the end of this Dev Diner podcast. Thanks for listening, and if you found this interesting, please spread it around to your friends, and if you’ve got developer friends out there who you think this is applicable to, help them ease their curiosities or confusions. And yeah, if there’s anything you’d like to ask Ian as well because I’m going to be going in and asking more questions. Feel free to ask questions, send me emails, and we’ll get Ian more involved. Thanks again.
Great, thanks.
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