The TechCrunch DISRUPT conference in San Francisco’s Design Center is a swarming of software-oriented Silicon Valley start-ups, venture firms, foreign techies, and media. Everywhere you go, there’s people in T shirts with hand held video cams recording "real time" from every angle the presenters and the packed exhibit floor. Who needs the NSA when we have these surveillance folks?!
The Monday opening session was heavy with the CEOs of the latest and greatest disrupters of industries, including SnapChat, Nest, Twitter, Dropbox, Lyft, Udacity and LinkedIn. The exhibit floor was packed with all manner of intriguing apps and software, with the mobile app area looking like the most vibrant with imagination. There were apps you didn’t know you needed, and frankly, probably may never need. But the imagination behind them was impressive.
Plop a policy type like me down amidst this swarm and it’s like going to Mars. I say Mars (and not Venus) because for the entire lead off morning session there was not a single female presenter or panelist! You can’t tell me that with all the female stars of Silicon Valley (Marissa! Sheryl! Meg!), not a single one could make it?! This glaring absence made me want to "lean in" and complain to the management.
Adding to this issue was the inappropriate presentation of "TitStare" the day before, an app to capture photos so you can do exactly what the name indicates. Apparently, the presenter went further and mimed what males looking at the TitStare photos might do, bringing this otherwise upstanding event into the Miley Cyrus-twerking rating category — and prompting apologies from TechCrunch to its attendees. Enough about what was unexpectedly disruptive. Here’s what was interesting.
The Current Darlings of Disruptors
The theme of the conference is "disruption" and the companies selected to be highlighted at the opening session delivered on that promise.
On disrupting education, Lt. Governor Gavin Newsom declared a "Code Red" for the "outdated" higher education establishment — including the University of California and California State University systems on whose boards he sits. He essentially complained that academia continues to teach in classrooms that have not changed for the past 200 years, blissfully ignoring the technology revolution that has occurred around them and utterly failing to engage students with different learning styles.
"The problem for us is our success at [our prior academic style] and the unwillingness to change our behavior," said Newsom, adding later that there is a lack of meaningful state support for education. Also on the panel was Sebastian Thrun of Udacity, one of the major providers of MOOC (Massive Open Online Universities). Udacity was founded by three roboticists who believe that much of the educational value of their university classes could be offered online for a very low cost. It has received $20 million in two rounds of funding. Thrun said Udacity is hugely reducing the very high cost of a college education using online tools. Traditional university presidents declined invitations to join the panel, noted moderator Alexia Tsotsis.
On disrupting transportation, co founders John Zimmer and Logan Green of Lyft are shaking up the taxi cab and black limousine sectors, with their mobile app-enabled service that just got a large infusion of cash from investors and reached the million rides mark. Zimmer emphasized its competition against Uber’s black town car service is going well, because of Lyft’s focus on a different experience than a traditional limousine ride. They said they maintain a "community," "peer-to-peer" feel starting with the quirky pink moustaches on the car grills and a fist pump exchanged when the rider enters the Lyft car. When asked about cease and desist orders issued by the Municipal Transit Agencies of San Francisco and Los Angeles, Zimmer said that the California Public Utilities Commission (CPUC) had issued a proposed decision containing safety standards such as driver background checks that will give the company and others like it the ability to move forward as a new category of transportation providers. (This state regulation would preempt local regulation by city MTAs.) Green said he hoped this CPUC framework would provide a model for going forward in other states.
On disrupting photosharing, Evan Spiegel of Snapchat discussed his company’s popular "ephemeral content" service. He said Snapchat is about "saving the moment" and provides a "disappearing" photo sent between two smart phones. Once the darling of the teenage set, Spiegel said his demographic increasingly includes the teens’ parents. In this age of NSA surveillance, Spiegel emphasized that his service does not make a digital photo secure. Receivers of a SnapChat photo can take a screen shot and hackers may be able to hack in to the service and retrieve images. In thinking about the future of his popular service this year with a consultant, Spiegel discussed its drive for monetization, and brainstorming about potential similar services like wearable tech or social media feeds of Snapchat photos.
On disruption of robotics, a panel entitled "These Aren’t the Droids You Are Looking For" — consisting of Matt Rogers of Nest, Rob Coneybeer of Shasta Ventures, Christian Sanz of Skycatch and Boris Sofman of Anki – discussed a world where robots will censor and monitor their surroundings and take action without human intervention. Nest’s Rogers described the challenge of tackling an intelligent thermostat that learns as you use it. The problem the Nest device solves is that dumb thermostats are in every home, there is no ability to see into its workings, and it wastes energy. The value proposition of a smart thermostat is it saves energy and money for homeowners. Christian Sanz of Skycatch designs drones including flying drones that can perform tasks for humans quickly. He works with large companies who want to deploy thousands of drones to extract information and send it around to various company locations. Skycatch focuses on industrial uses like construction, mining, agriculture, logistics and energy (such as wind turbines and solar panels). Drones can help with management tasks, keeping resources fulfilled, and security functions.
Boris Sofman of Anki uses artificial intelligence and robotics to bring products to consumers to delight and entertain them. Their first product is Anki Drive, coming out this fall. This product consists of robotic cars who know their locations precisely, their environment and have personalities. In the future Anki will make other consumer-oriented robotic products.
The Personal Revolution
Also on the theme of disruption, Sir Michael Moritz of Sequoia Capital delivered the keynote address tracing human progress from an agrarian society, to the Industrial Revolution to the Personal Revolution. He described what he calls the Data Factory, where people and businesses have many tools at their disposal, many of which are free or low cost. The powers that enabled the rise of the Data Factory are the explosion of bandwidth, storage, and apps, plus the rapidly falling cost of computing and disbursement of tools. Examples he gave of low cost tools were systems like Rackspace, Amazon; databases like MySQL and CB; productivity tools like Google Apps and DropBox; free texting like WhatsApp; fulfillment like Amazon.com; and customer service like Zendesk. Sir Moritz said these changes are very profound, and helps individuals do business in a different way. He named companies that help businesses with the matching of labor to jobs (LinkedIn, Alnace, Craigslist), money raising (BillMeLater, Prosper, LendingClub, KickStarter, IndieGogo, Finders Club), and companies with global reaches like Amazon.com, Facebook, Google.
Sir Moritz argued that the Data Factory changes the complexion of our lives starting with the workplace. It allows consumers to make a living using these low cost data factory tools. Examples he gave were a woman who makes her living by performing TaskRabbit jobs, a person who sells on Ebay as a secondary source of income or a person who owns an eBay store as their main job, an author who uses Kindle’s self publishing website to publish her books online, and an Asian female celebrity who uses YouTube to sell make-up to consumers.
Future Disrupters
A 24 hour Disrupt SF Hackathon occurred over the preceding weekend to the conference with a record 264 entrants. The grand prize winner was Spruce, a dictation service for on line reading. It tells users how long it will take to read online content with its platform, and improves students’ reading comprehension. First runner up was Cloudiverse which helps secure file sharing by breaking files into smaller components and reassemblying the file after transmission via encryption.
And a Nice Moment on Leadership
Twitter’s CEO Dick Costolo made a splash by taking his 15 minute session on How to Lead and never once mentioning his company. He passionately argued for the young leaders in the room to do two things as leaders: (1) Care deeply about your people while not worrying about what they think of you; and to (2) remember there are many different ways to be successful, so lead in a way that is true to you.
TechCrunch continues until Wednesday in the San Francisco Design Center.
