Firstly -- this is a quality article, the best I have read in a long time. This was years in the making, maybe even years in the reflecting.
I am not going to make the mistake of jumping to some easy conclusion like "New Zealand should have an incubator". I do not think Mark himself makes that mistake, even though he is actively designing an effective founder-fund-launch-refine community.
But perhaps I can pinprick with a few additional threads. Let's start by picking on time.
I do not think it is a gross error to say that, often, in decades past, people worked slower. Apprenticing was still common. Working for one industry and one company for life still happened. But the advent of the microprocessor shifted this, and speed is increasing. In a single day I have finished a 150-page report with 25 appendices, fully structured and spell-checked, that would have taken me a week or longer just a few decades ago. We seem to live for speed.
That attitude, for a variety of reasons, often also infects expectations, both of founders, funders and perhaps especially wannabe "rich" new entrepreneurs. I think these short-run incubators are basically "dance partners... for one dance". Quick in and out.
Sometimes that works. If so, great. As Mark points out, Y Comb is rather like Harvard: there is such intense competition to get in, that it is rich with cream.
The problem, in my view, is this: the "quick in 'n out" model does not fit all potentially great innovation projects. Sometimes a project hits a wall for a while... maybe awaiting a change in a regulatory environment, or a new deep alliance, or a new technical innovation, or even current startups to stagnate and fail, or even for a new economic cycle swing. Patience may not be a virtue -- but it also can be pure reality. And the "quick in 'n out" style of business innovation does not take kindly to this other way of work. Does it? Am I wrong?
Mark would be one of the few I know who I would trust to really talk about "Root Cause" issues, in the NZ case. Maybe in another Antipodean Musing, he could descend to this evolutionary stratum.
I think one could make a case for momentum.
In a complex system of somewhat competitive players, each with different agenda, appetites for risk, timeframes, internal pressures/constraints/regulations, cashflows and so on, and each in their own world of "Two steps forward, one step back", what creates momentum?
We know what the answer is not. It is not any one puzzle piece in isolation. Timing alone will not do it. Funding alone will not create sustained expansion. Intelligence and AI, high performance teams, blah blah... no one piece will do it.
Because it is a system. A system.
I am not good at the subtleties of Mark's points. But it seems that he is saying that to create fluid momentum through crises... it helps to collect the parties in one room, and encourage them to dance with each other. If not daily, then weekly. Hmm.
The devil's argument is probably this: why not only dance virtually? I think I cannot even attempt an answer, because this would require entertaining VR as well as the conventional "video call", and probably a range of other possibilities/challenges.
What we know, e.g. from careful studies Google did, is that high performance teams come in all sorts of flavors, but share one common universal requirement: safety. In other words, even the shyest, meekest, quietest little mouse can regularly exercise a heard voice. I am not sure that virtual comms always do this; in my experience they struggle with more than a few people, and conversations are often "polished" and "simplified". Maybe that works in a corporate setting, but the entrepreneurial world is all about rough edges -- and they should not be polished out. If anything they should be magnified, much as they would be in art or music.
I have a deep fondness for the challenges faced by many universities globally. Often, I feel like what they struggle with is tech transfer. Universities are not made for that. But unless industry creates mechanisms that "pull" R&D from universities and commercialize "tech transfer" them, the system encourages waste and fakery by profs who are forced to meet demands by their grants. Pull. Pull is insufficient.
A thought experiment: what if NZ found a way to create massive pull for innovation? What would this, per se, do? Hmm. I rather imagine a number of things would change, foremost amongst them the sustainability and number of people employed to deliver that innovation. The horse would not just pull the cart, the horse would demand a cart with better wheels that is easier to pull!
I apologise. I do not have "the answers". I just feel like something fundamental in this "equation" feels out of balance. And will be most keen to hear what Mark suggests.
Firstly -- this is a quality article, the best I have read in a long time. This was years in the making, maybe even years in the reflecting.
I am not going to make the mistake of jumping to some easy conclusion like "New Zealand should have an incubator". I do not think Mark himself makes that mistake, even though he is actively designing an effective founder-fund-launch-refine community.
But perhaps I can pinprick with a few additional threads. Let's start by picking on time.
I do not think it is a gross error to say that, often, in decades past, people worked slower. Apprenticing was still common. Working for one industry and one company for life still happened. But the advent of the microprocessor shifted this, and speed is increasing. In a single day I have finished a 150-page report with 25 appendices, fully structured and spell-checked, that would have taken me a week or longer just a few decades ago. We seem to live for speed.
That attitude, for a variety of reasons, often also infects expectations, both of founders, funders and perhaps especially wannabe "rich" new entrepreneurs. I think these short-run incubators are basically "dance partners... for one dance". Quick in and out.
Sometimes that works. If so, great. As Mark points out, Y Comb is rather like Harvard: there is such intense competition to get in, that it is rich with cream.
The problem, in my view, is this: the "quick in 'n out" model does not fit all potentially great innovation projects. Sometimes a project hits a wall for a while... maybe awaiting a change in a regulatory environment, or a new deep alliance, or a new technical innovation, or even current startups to stagnate and fail, or even for a new economic cycle swing. Patience may not be a virtue -- but it also can be pure reality. And the "quick in 'n out" style of business innovation does not take kindly to this other way of work. Does it? Am I wrong?
Mark would be one of the few I know who I would trust to really talk about "Root Cause" issues, in the NZ case. Maybe in another Antipodean Musing, he could descend to this evolutionary stratum.
I think one could make a case for momentum.
In a complex system of somewhat competitive players, each with different agenda, appetites for risk, timeframes, internal pressures/constraints/regulations, cashflows and so on, and each in their own world of "Two steps forward, one step back", what creates momentum?
We know what the answer is not. It is not any one puzzle piece in isolation. Timing alone will not do it. Funding alone will not create sustained expansion. Intelligence and AI, high performance teams, blah blah... no one piece will do it.
Because it is a system. A system.
I am not good at the subtleties of Mark's points. But it seems that he is saying that to create fluid momentum through crises... it helps to collect the parties in one room, and encourage them to dance with each other. If not daily, then weekly. Hmm.
The devil's argument is probably this: why not only dance virtually? I think I cannot even attempt an answer, because this would require entertaining VR as well as the conventional "video call", and probably a range of other possibilities/challenges.
What we know, e.g. from careful studies Google did, is that high performance teams come in all sorts of flavors, but share one common universal requirement: safety. In other words, even the shyest, meekest, quietest little mouse can regularly exercise a heard voice. I am not sure that virtual comms always do this; in my experience they struggle with more than a few people, and conversations are often "polished" and "simplified". Maybe that works in a corporate setting, but the entrepreneurial world is all about rough edges -- and they should not be polished out. If anything they should be magnified, much as they would be in art or music.
I have a deep fondness for the challenges faced by many universities globally. Often, I feel like what they struggle with is tech transfer. Universities are not made for that. But unless industry creates mechanisms that "pull" R&D from universities and commercialize "tech transfer" them, the system encourages waste and fakery by profs who are forced to meet demands by their grants. Pull. Pull is insufficient.
A thought experiment: what if NZ found a way to create massive pull for innovation? What would this, per se, do? Hmm. I rather imagine a number of things would change, foremost amongst them the sustainability and number of people employed to deliver that innovation. The horse would not just pull the cart, the horse would demand a cart with better wheels that is easier to pull!
I apologise. I do not have "the answers". I just feel like something fundamental in this "equation" feels out of balance. And will be most keen to hear what Mark suggests.