More TED Thoughts

Since the journalists who attended TED last week are slowly trickling out their articles on the TED experience, I figure I can still get away with a couple more belated thoughts on the conference.

My first observation is that conference organizers have learned their lesson about confidentiality since the Wall Street Journal executive conference last year. During that conference, I wrote about Bill Gates' comments on emerging technology. It turned out that the journalists at the conference were unable to write about Gates' comments because the comments were expressly off the record. But the conference organizers had not thought about telling bloggers to keep Gates' comments quiet and, as a result, they weren't. In contrast, this year at TED when Steve Case spoke, he too spoke on the condition that his comments be off the record. However, this time the request was made to the entire audience at the time of the interview. While we bloggers surely had no contractual obligation to uphold Case's request of confidentiality (as did the journalists who were comped at the WSJ conference), the fact that such a request had been made openly to everyone in the room made it morally difficult to report what Case had to say (for what it is worth, however, there frankly wasn't that much worth reporting on anyway). I have no doubt that Walt Mossberg has learned his lesson and will follow suit at his conference this year as well.

On a different note, I was struck by Brian Muirhead's comments on the NASA mission to Mars. Muirhead ran the mission and was given these instructions by the higher-ups at NASA -- "I want you to take risks but do not fail." Those instructions resonated with me because I have heard them spoken (in one form or another) a thousand times by Venture Capitalists. Muirhead attributed the success of the Mars project to three factors: 1) calculated risk taking, 2) the application of well tested technology, and 3) a great team (as he said in his talk, "it's the team, stupid."). Broadly speaking, these are precisely the success factors of any startup. I would suggest that first and foremost, it is the team stupid. And with a great team, it is possible to take calculated risk based upon the application of well tested technology. While it may be unrealistic to suggest that NASA or any startup can take big risks to develop transformative technology and reject failure as even a possibility, yet that is precisely what we VCs are looking for and demanding of our startups. Its a tall order but, hey, if we can land a rover on Mars, how frickin' hard can it be to build a piece of enterprise software.

Comments

[michael sippey]

Ah, such sweet irony.

From the Feb 26 post on the value of iterative design: "While we all aim to be perfect the first time around, it is a pipe dream. Great products and services are born out of trial and error."

From this post: "While it may be unrealistic to suggest that NASA or any startup can take big risks to develop transformative technology and reject failure as even a possibility, yet that is precisely what we VCs are looking for and demanding of our startups."

Failing faster and evolving sooner is the obvious response, but would you have had the patience to sustain the Handspring team if the Treo 300 was their first product to market?

[David Hornik]

Indeed, it is ironic. As was the final line of this post. I certainly didn't say I was defending Venture Capitalists for demanding risk and perfection at the same time. Quite to the contrary. I simply said that it was a characteristic and unrealistic demand.

[Con Tendem]

Hm. It seems to me the party line is pretty clear, if tricky to navigate. "It is ok to fail as long as you do not fail because you have a bad team or made a poor bet on technology you did not understand or use properly" When assessing risk for your next venture VCs are going to take the cause of failure into account...

How true this really is would probably depend on very specific VCs you deal with, how much money was lost, and exact reasons it was lost.

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