Between Worlds

I’ve spent a lot of time lately thinking about logistics. Supply chains might not strike you as a particularly interesting topic, but if you think about it, one of the first industries to be disrupted by our obsession with ordering everything and anything online, is the complex business of moving things around. To get a better handle on just what that kind of complexity entails, I met up with Rob van Egmond in Amsterdam, who runs a company called Quintiq. In Rob’s view, complexity is the natural state of 21st century companies. Trying to control it is futile. The key to mastery is reacting to it with agility.

From humble beginnings as street performance in a small Quebec town in 1984, Cirque du Soleil has grown to become the world’s most diverse, and dynamic brand of creative performances. On a recent visit to Las Vegas, which is home to seven permanent Cirque productions, I caught up with Jay Guilford, who is the creative content strategist for their team building program, SPARK. SPARK helps big companies embrace some of the innovation and creativity that is at the heart of the Cirque du Soleil shows, albeit without some of the accompanying acrobatics of course.

Montreal, it turns out, is ground zero for some of the best and brightest in the emergent AI community. Look closely at the newly hired AI ranks at Google, Uber or Facebook and you will lots of expat Canadians. Now, a new company called Element AI, is working to help other companies apply the very same cutting edge deep-learning research to commercial problems from manufacturing to logistics. One of the co-founders of Element AI is JS Cornoyer, who also started Montreal Startup and Real Ventures. Catching up at his co-working digs in downtown Montreal, we spoke about the future of deep-learning, and the kinds of empathetic skills that will be prized in humans in a post-automation future.

Andy Harries runs Left Bank Pictures - which, if you happen to love shows like the Crown, Outlander, Strike Back, Cold Feet or Prime Suspect - is probably responsible for much of your time spent staring blankly a screen. Andy and I met when I was running a strategy workshop for Sony Pictures Television in London. Catching up over a cup of tea, we chatted about how the rise of ‘OTT’ entertainment brands is changing the business of television, what it was like to raise teenager kids who became overnight YouTube stars, and the strange, dark corners of British creativity.

Starting work in the nineties, I quickly discovered that professional mastery had a lot to do with your ability to manipulate complex Excel spreadsheets. Analysts crunched numbers, programmers cracked code. These days, 21st century companies are trying to do the exact opposite - putting the power to create software and automate activities, in the hands of people closest to the work. Rick Willett, CEO of Quickbase, is one of the people leading this no-code revolution. Formerly at GE, and now focused on reinventing enterprise collaboration, we spoke about the future of work and the power of algorithmic decision making.

I caught up with Jamie Metzl for a coffee in Bryant Park, New York. A fellow futurist, geopolitical expert and sci-fi novelist - suffice to say, we had lots to chat about. Jamie is a Senior Fellow of the Atlantic Council, serves on the Advisory Council to Walmart’s Future of Retail Policy Lab, and even ran (unsuccessfully) for the U.S. House of Representatives. It seemed strangely appropriate that our topic of conversation - human performance and leveraging technology to live much longer - was with someone who himself completed thirteen Ironman triathlons, twenty-nine marathons, and twelve ultramarathons.

With more than 200 inches of snow each year, and a good eight hour drive from a major city, Michigan Tech didn’t see many recruiters from outside of the Midwest. That didn’t seem right to Garrett Lord. Why should talent be located just in geographies closest to tech companies? After driving to college campuses across the country, he realized that student access to opportunities was universally unequal, and so along with Scott Ringwelski and Ben Christensen, decided to form Handshake to reinvent the college recruiting business. I caught up with Garrett in Las Vegas, to talk about how data might change the way companies find, recruit and manage talent in the future.

Magnus is a cool guy. As a fellow futurist, speaker and writer, we had met another times professionally over the years, in a variety of cities - but most recently in Kuala Lumpur, we got to properly hang out, and talk about a wide range of seemingly unconnected, but hopefully interesting things. Magnus is Director for Trendspotting and Future Thinking at Stockholm School of Entrepreneurship, and an active member of TED. His most recent book Minifesto (2016) tells us why small ideas matter in the world of grand narratives.

Arthur Hayes has a big idea. He wants to build the Goldman Sachs of Bitcoin. Starting life as an equity derivatives trader, on his first day of trading, Lehman Brothers collapsed. A few years ago, he formed BitMEX, the Bitcoin Mercantile Exchange. BitMEX is trading platform that gives retail investors access to the global financial markets using Bitcoin, the Blockchain, and financial derivatives. BitMEX through the use of Bitcoin as collateral, allows anyone anywhere to trade any type of financial asset. The vision is that even the unbanked in emerging markets, with just a $1 to invest or save, might be served by this entirely new model of financial services.

I met William almost ten years ago when he was a technology analyst in Hong Kong, and I was consulting for Star TV. The Chinese Internet was already rapidly evolving then, and now, a decade later, the combination of a sophisticated technology, a mobile-first culture and relative isolation behind a national firewall, has led to a vastly different digital ecosystem. Based in Shanghai, William is now an Investment Partner at SOSV and the Managing Director of Chinaccelerator. William joined SOSV from SingTel Innov8 where he was the Managing Director supporting China investment activities. Previously William was a Partner at Softbank China & India Holdings, an early stage venture capital firm backed by Softbank of Japan and Cisco.