November 2, 2005

Steve Case and US Healthcare

Fortune writes how Steve Case [ex-AOL] is seeking to reinvent healthcare in the US:

Inspired by his older brother’s brave struggle with brain cancer (Dan Case died in 2002), the country’s worsening health-care crisis, and the tantalizing chance to build another company from scratch, Case launched Revolution Health Group, a collection of small firms designed to give patients control over their medical decisionsletting them search for specialists, book appointments, learn about their illnesses, and manage their health-care costs online.
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What’s the business plan? John Pleasants, whom Case installed as CEO of the health group in September, says selling subscriptions to consumers and ad space to companies will be two big revenue streams. But Revolution also hopes to make money by doing everything from reselling health insurance policies offered by other companies to charging consumers for online doctor visits.

ISPs Choose Wi-Fi

NYTimes writes that ISPs are using Wi-Fi to battle the telcos:

The wireless option is attractive because it does not require building or leasing costly underground lines, and the cost of Wi-Fi equipment and installation is falling rapidly, said Donald B. Berryman, president of a new division of EarthLink, called EarthLink Municipal Networks.

“There is so much going on” in the wireless market, Mr. Berryman said. “We see this as a huge opportunity to grow our business.”

As part of the agreement with Philadelphia, EarthLink obtained public rights-of-way to build a wireless network covering the city’s 135 square miles. The company will pay the construction costs, which Mr. Berryman said could be as little as $10 million, compared with the hundreds of millions of dollars EarthLink would have to spend to lay copper or fiber cables for a conventional broadband network.

EarthLink is not alone in betting on Wi-Fi. Many smaller telecommunications players are bidding for Wi-Fi contracts with big cities like Minneapolis and New York, which are eager to attract new businesses, give residents alternatives to the cable and phone companies and make it possible for lower-income residents to get an Internet link.

Turing’s Cathedral

[via John Battelle] George Dyson writes in Edge:

We can divide the computational universe into three sectors: computable problems; non-computable problems (that can be given a finite, exact description but have no effective procedure to deliver a definite result); and, finally, questions whose answers are, in principle, computable, but that, in practice, we are unable to ask in unambiguous language that computers can understand.

We do most of our computing in the first sector, but we do most of our living (and thinking) in the third. In the real world, most of the time, finding an answer is easier than defining the question. It’s easier to draw something that looks like a cat, for instance, than to describe what, exactly, makes something look like a cat. A child scribbles indiscriminately, and eventually something appears that resembles a cat. A solution finds the problem, not the other way around. The world starts making sense, and the meaningless scribbles (and a huge number of neurons) are left behind.

This is why Google works so well. All the answers in the known universe are there, and some very ingenious algorithms are in place to map them to questions that people ask.
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My visit to Google? Despite the whimsical furniture and other toys, I felt I was entering a 14th-century cathedral not in the 14th century but in the 12th century, while it was being built. Everyone was busy carving one stone here and another stone there, with some invisible architect getting everything to fit. The mood was playful, yet there was a palpable reverence in the air. “We are not scanning all those books to be read by people,” explained one of my hosts after my talk. “We are scanning them to be read by an AI.”

When I returned to highway 101, I found myself recollecting the words of Alan Turing, in his seminal paper Computing Machinery and Intelligence, a founding document in the quest for true AI. “In attempting to construct such machines we should not be irreverently usurping His power of creating souls, any more than we are in the procreation of children,” Turing had advised. “Rather we are, in either case, instruments of His will providing mansions for the souls that He creates.”

Google is Turing’s cathedral, awaiting its soul. We hope.

Making Money

Russell Beattie has a follow-up to his post on Ambition in today’s start-ups:

The basics of making money still are the same. You have to create something of value and then find someone who wants to give you money for it. Yes, the concepts of products and services may have munged together a bit, and values for things are completely arbitrary – ringtones which are nothing more than 30 kilobytes of simulated music are a $4 billion market – but the basic tenet is the same.
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I think that well know what the next big startup is right away because theyll be generating real value and real cash right off the bat, the founder(s) will insist on it. But theyll also have that big plan as well – a somewhat naive, but in general beneficient attitude towards changing the world. Maybe it wont happen just as they planned, many of the companies profiled in the book Built To Last were started to do one thing, and then went off to do another. But in general I think it takes that special combination of talents to reallly hit it big.

Mobiles for All

MSNBC has a story from Business Week:

There are now about 2 billion mobile-phone users in the world, and market penetration is above 50% in advanced countries. But as prices for phones and service drop, another billion customers could sign up by 2010 from places such as China, India, Brazil, and Russia. “All the growth in subscribers is coming from emerging markets,” says David Taylor, Motorola’s director of strategy and operations for high-growth markets. Researchers predict that of the 1 billion cell phones expected to be sold in 2010, half will be in developing economies. Most will cost less than $40 — still out of reach for the poorest one-third of the world’s population but affordable for the middle third. “This market is wicked big,” says senior analyst John Jackson of telecom researcher Yankee Group Research Inc. in Boston.

TECH TALK: Vision and Worries: Talent

The second worry that I discussed was Talent. I have plenty of ideas on what Id like to build out in the future. But these ideas will not go anywhere if we cannot bring in the best talent. This realisation hit home when Girish walked in and said, Rajesh, we have a strategy for lots of things. But we dont have a strategy on how we are going to recruit the hundred best people over the next few months. Without this team, we arent going to go too far. He was right. I hadnt thought about much about it till then.

In IndiaWorld, I never had to worry about people much. We were a small team. My wife and I led from the front. While we did have attrition, it didnt matter much because the small core team that we had could essentially take care of all that needed to be done. In Netcore, the work we did while exciting was not extraordinary to require bringing in great talent. So, in essence, I never worried about building the best team.

The irony was that Id read about the need for great talent everywhere. For a long time, I thought if I could just get the right ideas in place, execution would not be a problem. Over the past year, as the scope of what Ive wanted to do has enlarged, Ive realised that I was wrong. Without the best team in place, execution will not happen. Now, I worry about how we are going to build this great team over the coming months.

As Jack Welch put it: Hiring good people is hard. Hiring great people is brutally hard. Yet nothing matters more in winning than getting the right people on the field, then guiding them on the right way to succeed and get ahead.

In this context, these words from Joe Krause ring true:

I always keep two things in mind when hiring, no matter how desperate I feel.

1. a bad employee does far more damage than no employee, no matter the issue.
2. A players hire A players, B players hire C players, and C players hire losers. Let your standards slip once and you’re only two generations away from death.

Any hiring process should focus on never letting in a bad fit. Even if that means accidentally rejecting a lot of people that would be good fits. Said another way, it optimizes for no false positives, even at the expense of false negatives.

So, as we go ahead, this is for me the most important worry and challenge. How do I get the best people in? On that will hinge the success of what we want to do.

Tomorrow: Being Blind-sided

Continue reading TECH TALK: Vision and Worries: Talent