this circle so imagine that this circle
is an area of human endeavor that you’re
really interested in but you know
nothing about right and but you want to
get engaged with it but it’s always
going to have a bunch of experts in it
and if you try and say something these
experts are going to say something like
this hey kid a little knowledge is a
dangerous thing but I want to talk to
you today about the fact that I don’t
think a little knowledge of something is
a dangerous thing I actually think it’s
a really really great thing I am and
always have been a geek this is me at
five years old I grew up in Adelaide
Australia I just remembered I’m in a
stand in the circle I grew up in
Adelaide Australia and I always loved
tinkering Here I am helping my dad fix
the family car but I was always building
things breaking things I was a whore of
a kid but I ended up doing engineering
and then did a PhD in electrical
engineering and then you know I love
doing it I love building things and the
problem was at the time in Australia
which was the 1980s if you got a degree
in electrical engineering my speciality
was building silicon chips
there was no jobs for you in Australia
so eventually I decided to leave
Australia move to the US because that’s
where silicon chips were and still are
built I mean in fact to make it even
more difficult I moved from beautiful
sunny Australia in the middle of summer
to darkest central New Jersey in the
middle of winter and I worked in this
giant glass box it’s actually an amazing
institution called Bell Labs which was a
research organization had 17 Nobel Prize
winners Bell Labs invented the
transistor the Lay’s of a communication
satellite the UNIX operating system all
sorts of stuff had a great time there
but I’ve always been someone that tends
to get a little bored and I realized I
didn’t want to spend the rest of my
career working on those things and went
to Columbia got an MBA at Columbia came
out of that and those of you in the
audience that have an MBA you may know
we have to attest you come out with an
MBA convinced you can do anything
because they say you’re really smart
really smart and so I thought I could do
startup companies
so I did a series of startup companies
and they started off awful and gradually
got less worse over time eventually I
ran one founded wasn’t with some friends
at Caltech called alixus that built a
small D a kind of a DNA sequencer we
sold it to a company called alumina
which is a big DNA sequencing company
down in San Diego I write there and I
was a company that was full of really
smart scientists and biologists and I
literally didn’t do any biology in my
entire school career I thought it was
cutting up frogs I didn’t want anything
to do with it and so I never touched it
so I arrived in this company I was
trying to work out what it was that I
might be able to do and I got really
curious about the idea of these DNA
sequences were all over the world and
they were generating all this data but
no there was nowhere to pull all the
information together where you could
start to make interesting observations
about it so I led a team when we built a
thing called base space which led all of
aluminous sequences upload data on the
internet into the cloud computing
infrastructure that Amazon is built it’s
actually one that broke down the other
day but it was an amazing system and
it’s now the world’s biggest genome
database again I got a little bored will
frustrated because that was kind of
working well and I got antsy hey God
given a very different job which was
being an evangelist for aluminous
technology and the use of DNA sequencing
in medicine so that was an extraordinary
opportunity had traveled all over the
world met lots of interesting people
with the idea of getting together with
governments and saying how sequencing
and what’s called precision medicine
could help their healthcare systems
great pleasure for me is I got to have
dinner with the Prime Minister of
Australia with he and his wife at his
house which was an absolutely amazing
opportunity it’s a kid that grew up in
Australia and then just a couple of
weeks ago I left Illumina because I got
bored again and have just started what’s
now my fifth I think four / fifth
company a company called chroma code
they also down San Diego away but along
this path what I found is that in the
various jobs I’ve done some don’t
require a lot of creativity
some of them do rely on a lot of
creativity but what I concluded over
time is that the that thinks that’s
interesting around creativity is when
you jumble two things together to have
them
being done you know I think as someone
like Einstein right really bright people
don’t have to do this because they’ll be
creative and invent something like BAM
it just comes out of nowhere but for the
rest of us I think the best we can do is
find something here and find something
here and bring it together and see what
it means you know jumble it around the
problem with that is you’re usually
coming from somewhere where you may be
you know a reasonable amount but you’ve
got to come into this other area and
probably don’t know anything around it
and this is where you get this a little
knowledge is a dangerous thing but as I
think you probably appreciate it’s also
advantageous if you push past the
experts the experts that are skeptical
if you push past them you can actually
be coming at things in a very new way
and obviously there’s a lot of students
here and I would urge you to understand
you are so well equipped to do that you
have so few preconceptions about things
that I would say you’re ignorant is
perhaps your biggest competitive
advantage a couple of examples that are
current at the moment lin-manuel Miranda
you know took the traditional Broadway
musical and combined it with hip hop in
American history
and built Hamilton right just an
absolutely amazing success Trey Parker
and Matt Stone took animation and
profanity right animation which is like
the most conservative and motherhood and
apple pie medium in American television
and put profanity in it and came up with
South Park right and you can tell if you
watch South Park for 10 seconds there
were no animators right there not
animation experts but they were
absolutely profanity experts and then of
course you know in recent times probably
most memorably Steve Jobs he was not a
technologist he wasn’t an engineer he
was an expert designer but he was good
enough at several of those things to be
absolutely amazing in terms of the
results that he got I was very fortunate
in the early 1990s at Bell Labs he came
to visit us and at the time this was
sort of pre what I would call consumer
internet the internet existed and Bell
Labs had a big role in how the internet
was designed and how it worked and Steve
came to visit us to tell us what a bunch
of idiot
and this was surprising right cuz I was
sitting next to Ana Penzias who’s a
Nobel Prize winner and Steve is up there
and he and we’re very you know in most
in the technology and how it works and
this and that tcp/ip and packets and
switches and all this sort of thing and
he had such a he was an a detailed
knowledgeable person on that issue but
he had this really clear vision right he
had the Steve Jobs vision he was looking
at networking right he looked at a
million things we’ve seen it all right
we looked at music you look at phones
the right then he was looking at
networking he said I wish I’d a wall
he said you know all I want is to be
able to plug the computer into the wall
just like I plug it in and get
electricity out of it I want to plug a
cable into the wall and get data across
the country or across the world it needs
to be that simple to use and I can’t
believe you people are so effing stupid
that you can’t do that and we’re all
blown away
it was amazing he was so compelling and
so extraordinary that it really changed
the course of all the work we were doing
around networking and how we thought
about the internet and I’ve often
marveled in fact that if he made that
big a difference to that group of people
in just one day of his life in all the
days of his life he must have done as we
know pretty extraordinary things so
nothing on that scale but just to give
you my little story of creativity as I
mentioned I got PhD in electrical
engineering and I knew how to design
chips I wasn’t actually very good at it
because I’m not a detail person and if
you’re designing something with a
billion pieces in it you actually have
to be a detail person but it would get
by alright but also when I was a kid I
was fascinated by cameras my mother was
a professional photographer and she had
a darkroom and for those old enough for
remember once upon a time cameras had
film in them which is a chemical process
the light went onto the film he
developed the film and another chemical
and you printed it and you developed the
paper and another chemical and then you
fixed it it was actually kind of fun as
a kid because it seemed kind of magical
and kind of chemically but when I got to
Bell Labs and I knew about chips I was
really interested in the idea of could
you build a chip that would detect the
light from the image you know could you
build the equivalent of film out of a
chip and I wasn’t the only person that
was working on this I looked around and
found a group at NASA who were very
interested in building very tiny light
cameras for spacecraft and we teamed up
together and worked for a number of
years
actually ended up building what are
called active pixel senses which are the
kind of chips that you would find today
inside every cell phone I think there’s
around 2 billion of them built every
year but along the way we hit some rough
patches I remember once going to one of
the big Japanese camera manufacturers
and visiting him in Japan and showing
them the images that we have and they
literally just laughed at us you know
they kind of polite Japanese laughs that
we couldn’t really tell what was going
on but they were laughing at us because
they thought that we thought that
somehow these crude pictures would one
day in any way overtake film film
cameras and then something you did a
little after that again the concept of
bringing two things together someone
asked me given these cameras was there a
way we could detect fingerprints and
it’s thinking well you could have
because right back then you would use a
camera to look at a fingerprint but then
I started to think what it would be like
I would look so I didn’t know anything
about fingerprints but you can just look
at your own fingerprint you can see
obviously that there are ridges and
valleys right this there’s depth and
height and I started to think well if
you were a silicon chip and there was a
finger on top of you what would it look
like and there’d be big ridges and
there’d be big gaps and we built a chip
and it actually worked the first time
based on fingerprints and we actually
built the first fingerprint ship and
filed the patents back in 1995 and
around 1 billion of those are made every
year I’ve never made a cent out of it
but Apple does own my patent that’s my
claim to fame around that I’ll talk more
about that a moment but in this process
you know it also let me think about
along the way different stages because I
went back to get my MBA and I got my PhD
so I’ve done a lot of school and think
about learning and the importance of
learning and back to you know the prior
talk about pivoting I was in research I
got my MBA that let me come out as a
business person right learning and doing
a course can help you a lot in the pivot
and again I would urge folks obviously
the students here to stress the
importance of that education and come
back at any point in your life and be a
big help in making a pivot so learning
is important but the more for me
personally and maybe this is just in my
nature than
most effective thing for me is failure
this is SpaceX Elon Musk’s company we’ve
been working to land Rockets right to
recover the Walker first time we’re
going to land it but nearly every time
they do it it just falls over and
crashes into the ground and they have no
shame about this still like it’s
probably not going to work and put the
rocket up it’s going to come down it’s
going to fall over and you know if I
think they land on these barges and the
cool that barge
tell me again you love me which i think
is a great name for a buck but you know
the ability to try things and fail is
incredibly powerful if someone said to
me you don’t it’s actually someone who
gave me some venture capital money when
I didn’t think they would because I just
screwed something up he said how people
don’t learn anything from success you
only learned from failure I’m sure you
learned a lot it was other people’s
money don’t worry about it and so I
think failure is an amazing tool so when
you think about learning and this may
not be popular with all the parents here
I don’t think it’s that important what
you learn right I think it’s important
that you pick something you want to
learn that you’re going to enjoy that
you’re going to get good at that you get
a skill whether it be writing whether it
be painting whether it be coding get
that skill because that’s your first
step out into the world they could see
the credibility to get to your first job
it lets you actually contribute to teams
as soon as you’re there so I don’t think
you should worry too much about it
against Steve Jobs is probably more the
exception than the rule we should follow
but the only formal tertiary schooling I
think he did was calligraphy my he was
at Reed College and he ordered some
calligraphy classes and he said for
years afterwards that that had a huge
impact on his thoughts around aesthetics
so you never know I don’t think it’s
it’s possible to say what the right
subject particularly is and by the same
token when you’re choosing the thing
you’re going to fail that you’ve got a
really good passionate about that
because it’s going to be painful it’s
not going to work and you don’t want to
fail at something and then go away and
do something else that’s a little
counterintuitive you actually want to
come back and do the same thing that you
just failed at because you will have
learnt a lot on the prior turn so it’s
not a good policy I don’t think to fail
and go well I’m no good at that I should
move on to the next thing I think again
speaking from personal experience fail
fail and fail and keep failing the same
thing is very important the thing that I
love to do is stock companies and the
reason is and I used to love engineering
as I said but what I found even more
interesting that we can do in this this
country in this day and age in
particular with venture capital is
people start with just an idea right a
completely ephemeral thing an idea can’t
touch it feel it it isn’t worth anything
it’s just a form and then you take that
idea and you spin a story around it you
spin a story about how it’s going to
change the world
why it’s gonna make money go out to
venture capitalists and if you do a good
job they’ll give you money which is just
amazing to me because you had nothing a
moment ago and now you have a bunch of
money to turn nothing into something
then you turn to something and you build
a business now it often doesn’t work but
I just love that idea of that there
nothing to something and so I give you
my first example of something not
working
so back when the day when we were doing
the fingerprint companies I got the MBA
and I thought oh I’ll do a fingerprint
company it was a terrible disaster tens
of millions of dollars wasted I was the
CEO it lost at about three torturous
years where I never slept as cherry will
attest and the weird thing about it
actually wouldn’t have done any good if
I’d done a good job because the reality
was the fingerprint sensors were
invented in 1995 it wasn’t until 15
years later that they started to appear
in cell phones it was as things off for
now it just wasn’t ready it was too
expensive it was too fragile it was
going to take a lot of work and a lot of
evolution so a lot of the time these
things are timing as well so fingerprint
census happened but as I said 15 years
after we thought they would second time
around it was a company called Lux Terra
which was a technology out of Caltech
and it brought optical fibres directly
into silicon chips so silicon chips
could talk to each other directly using
light instead of electrons which they
typically do that one still took ten
years and it’s still it’s it’s actually
thriving now but it went through a lot
of pain and it took until the big cloud
computing companies were building these
giant data centers where they needed
light to move from one side of the to
the other instead of
electrons that Lux Terra really found
its fee and then you know getting a
little worse lease was each time alexis
was less than three years from when we
took the idea we raised the venture
capital money and we sold it to Illumina
so again but think about that I don’t
mean to put again the particularly the
young folks here off it took fifteen
years of trying and mucking it up to get
that right so I want to leave you with
this be excited we live in an
extraordinary time in an extraordinary
place and you were the recipients of a
most extraordinary education you’re
going to learn you have been learning
and you will continue to learn you
should go to college you’ll get the
opportunity to create I think the period
of time in your 20s or 30s and
extraordinary don’t know what’s going on
in the human brain I think it’s partly
this don’t know what you don’t know it
can be an amazing creative time then you
with if you do well at that they’ll give
you more resources and you can screw up
and learn a few times and that’s a you
know pretty exciting part of growing up
and eventually you will succeed thank you very much