Fred Wilson wrote some kind words in a post yesterday about seeing my thesis project Foundcity at the ITP Spring Show back in 2005. Reading it, and clicking on the link to the site was like stepping through a time warp that took me immediately back to the days when I was just graduating from ITP. Suddenly I was having vivid memories of events I hadn’t bothered to recall since they originally took place.

I remembered cobbling the site together hurriedly at the last minute before my thesis presentation - Google Maps had just become hackable a few weeks before the end of the semester, and I was scrambling to incorporate that into my project (don’t ask me what it was going to be before Gmaps was hackable…). I was actually scraping lat/long values off the html of the page - there was no API yet to get those things directly. I was going to call the project “Delicious City” - the idea being del.icio.us applied to real space - and Clay told me in his office, “never base your name on someone else’s project - if you do, it will never stand on its own, it will just be seen as a subset of the larger project.” So it became Foundcity instead. I never was happy with that name, btw, but sometimes you just run out of time trying to find a good name.

I remembered Fred introducing himself at the show and trying out the site, and thinking “oh my god, a real VC is demo’ing my thesis - how cool is that!” I had never even met a VC before. Up until that exact moment I had figured I was going to try to get a job in research at Intel or Yahoo or some such place after graduation. But suddenly the idea of being an entrepreneur started to seem appealing. Several other investors gave me their cards along with positive feedback over the course of the show, and I was hooked - I had forgotten all about research, and had decided to be an entrepreneur (much to my wife’s chagrin at the time).

I remembered going later to Union Square Ventures and pitching Fred and Brad on the project, how they started off with hardball questions, grilling me for about thirty minutes on all sorts of strategic and tactical questions, and then the questions slowly started to become more like helpful suggestions, then finally Fred said, “well, lets see how this works from my phone” and… it didn’t work. Nothing, no error message, just silence. No big deal, Fred said, just figure it out later and get back to me. He had a Treo 760, so I went home and contacted all of my friends immediately - “who has a Treo 760?” Found three with that model, tested it on their phones, and the site worked perfectly fine for them. Still, it didn’t work on Fred’s phone. His was literally the only phone the site didn’t work for. You can’t imagine my anguish. He was very helpful and tried to debug with me, but I never found the source of the problem despite hours of tweaking, googling and debugging.

We kept talking to USV and to other investors, but by the end of the summer it was clear to me that Foundcity wasn’t really a business, it was a thesis project. By that time though I was totally hooked on doing startups, and was thinking about my next move, reading books by Guy Kawasaki and starting to do the hard work of shifting from an ITP school project mentality to startup/business mentality.

And that was how I fell into the world of startups. That was three whole YEARS ago! It feels more like twenty, with everything I’ve been through in the intervening years.

Nice to step back in time occasionally and revisit those intense life shifts.

I got to the ITP show last night about half an hour before closing, so I didn’t get to see the whole show, but here were some projects I saw that I found interesting.

Epimetheus: networked fire detection “To add your node, contact your local team leader today” (are you listening, Anthony Townsend?)

Penultimater “The greatest mobile novel ever attempted, and you can help write it”.

KAAMKAJ “A tool to optimize micro-business activities”

World Mappings “A growing collection of maps detailing personal geographic histories”

This year’s show was more interesting than previous ones to me, in that the projects seemed to have more substance behind them - they were less glossy, but based on better ideas.

It’s on again tonight, from 5 to 9 if you want to check it out.

The most innovative member of a system is very often perceived as a deviant from the social system, and he or she is accorded a somewhat dubious status of low credibility by the average members of the system. This individual’s role in diffusion (especially in persuading others about the innovation) is therefore likely to be limited.

From Diffusion of Innovations by Everett M. Rogers.

I held off on writing about the Sarah Lacy / Mark Zuckerberg keynote “trainwreck” at SXSW when it originally happened, and was glad I did - it was pretty fascinating, but it got covered so thoroughly in the moment that there was no need to add more to the mix. But I keep thinking about it, and I keep seeing other indicators that something is going on much broader than just a single bad interview at a tech conference. So I jotted some notes down about this, and here they are:

The Lacy/Zuckerman interview was emblematic of a shift going on in on-stage events and performances right now. Audiences now have back channels during events thanks to group messaging apps, and that’s not going away. In fact, just the opposite - this will become more and more common to live events. In a short while these back channels will even become a normal, expected part of the audience experience at any stage event.

This totally changes the way information flows at these events. Communication in a performance environment historically has been one to many - the person on the stage communicated, and the people in the audience received that communication. There was some feedback from the audience, in the form of laughter, applause, nonverbal cues, etc., (Steven has a good post about tricks he uses to elicit this feedback while speaking), but for the most part the communication went in one direction.

Now though, with the arrival of applications like Twitter, you’ve got two types of communication happening in any performance simultaneously: you’ve still got the one-to-many communication from performer to audience, but you’ve also got a second, many-to-many conversation, between everyone in the audience. And here’s the critical thing about it: the ONLY person not involved in that many-to-many conversation is the person on stage. There is suddenly a second channel of information in the room, potentially as informative and interesting as the traditional one that goes from the performer to the audience, and the person up on the stage is left out of it completely. All of the information from the audience, which should be feedback to the performer, is now being channelled into group chat apps, and the one person who needs to get that feedback, so as to adjust their performance based on it, is totally oblivious to it.

When Sarah Lacy and Mark Zuckerberg had their talk at SXSW, there were 2,000 people in the room. 2 of them, Lacy and Zuckerberg, were having one conversation, while the other 1,998 were having a totally different conversation. If Lacy had had access to that second conversation, the interview would have gone very differently. The introduction of group messaging into public performance has created a big imbalance in the flow of information between performer and audience, and it puts the performer at a potentially big disadvantage.

Stage events have suddenly become many-to-many events in addition to being one-to-many. That’s a fundamental shift from what they have been historically. And since the person on stage herself is not included in that second, many-to-many conversation, it sets up an informational imbalance that is bound to lead to things like what happened at SXSW.

This imbalance will get dealt with in one way or another eventually, and performances will adapt. How this happens is a completely open question, of course, and we could see some interesting new practices spring up in the near future. Whatever the case, a new era of stage events is at hand.

I just got motivated by Dan Phiffer to sign up with tumblr, and now I have a tumblog.

You can see it at geraci.tumblr.com.

It’ll be interesting to see how this fits into my packed schedule of life, work and web content. It could be that I never get beyond my first post. Or it could be just the thing I’ve been waiting for all my life.

Because social effects lag behind technological ones by decades, real revolutions don’t involve an orderly transition from point A to point B. Rather they go from A through a long period of chaos and only then reach B. In that chaotic period, the old systems get broken long before the new ones become stable.

(…)

For a hundred years after it started, the printing press broke more things than it fixed, plunging Europe into a period of intellectual and political chaos that ended only in the 1600s.

From Here Comes Everybody, the excellent new book by friend and former teacher Clay Shirky.

Here’s the link to last night’s interview on Brian Lehrer Live. Here’s a screengrab, as well:

Boy, I look serious talking about hyperlocal blogging. I thought I was smiling that whole time - apparently not! This is very very serious stuff, let me tell you…

Two days ago I spoke at the Politics Online conference in DC, on a panel about online mapping. Then last night Steven and I went on the Brian Lehrer Live show, talking about outside.in. Both were really fun - I love the process of live Q&A, having to think on your feet and come up with sharp replies on the spot. I have to get more comfortable with the live TV format - it’s a bit daunting to know that you only get one chance to give a clear and interesting answer a particular question. Even on a panel in front of hundreds of people you can always say “wait, let me rephrase that”, but on live TV you feel like I’ve got to make this make sense in fifteen seconds flat, and no re-takes. The key of course is to be natural and not even think about it, and that comes with familiarity.

I had a moment this morning right as I woke up that reminded me of the morning after a first date (back in the days when I used to date), where I thought to myself, “oh my god - did I *really* say that last night? what the hell was I thinking??” But it’s all just fun and laughs at this point. You just have to accept the gaffes along with the good answers - it’s all part of the game, and that’s what makes it so much fun to play.

Innovation is the creation of new problems. Or rather it is the embodiment of a radical new idea that forces people to reckon with it, and that leads to new problems, or questions, for people to solve. Improvement is then the solving of problems that follows innovation. All of that improvement built on top of innovation translates to progress, or the creation of value, or whatever you want to call it. Most of what we do is improvement, very little is actual innovation.

Why do we care?

Well, when the mixture between innovation and improvement is just right, you have a healthy system of growth and new idea generation. It’s exciting to be a part of such a system.

But when the mixture isn’t right, when there’s not enough innovation to keep up with all of the improving that is endlessly happening, or when the innovation that is occurring is not of the big, paradigm-shifting sort but is of the minor, isn’t-that-nice sort, then you get problems. Things start to stagnate. People keep working on the same problems over and over, trying to eek out improvements, but they start to see less and less return on their efforts. Left alone, without being given something new to work at, some new idea to improve upon, their efforts at improvement will eventually yield no return at all - no improvement. Beyond that, if they continue, their efforts will actually have negative results.

Improvement of innovation over time yields diminishing returns.

As an example, think of the steam engine. The steam engine was an enormous innovation, and after its invention it was improved upon for years and years in innumerable ways. Today nobody bothers to improve on the idea of the steam engine any more, because newer innovations in transportation have allowed people to turn their focus elsewhere. The steam engine is obsolete. But imagine if newer innovations had not displaced the steam engine - imagine if people were still improving on the basic idea today. What would those improvements be like? The answer is that they would be very difficult and expensive to come by, and the value they yielded would be very small, especially compared with the value of much earlier improvements. Improvement, over time, yields diminished returns.

Luckily innovation has moved us beyond the steam engine, and nobody is faced with the problem of trying to improve on an idea that has been essentially perfected.

There is a book that I read a while back, called The Collapse of Complex Societies. In it, the author, an archaeologist, argues that every complex society ever to have existed has eventually collapsed under the weight of its own increasing complexity. As societies grow, they naturally become more complex, and complexity beyond a certain point yields decreasing returns on investment. Constant improvement over the tools by which you keep society operating smoothly becomes costlier and costlier, and yet gives you less and less in return. Past a certain point, it isn’t worth the effort to keep up the work. The work you put in is greater than the reward you get out. When this happens, societies collapse - they revert to a simpler form, with less complexity. That, in the end, proves to be more profitable for the people in question.

The only thing that offsets this ever-decreasing return on investment for societies, which would otherwise lead to collapse, is innovation - the introduction of new ideas that give them new ways to meet their challenges. Those new ideas, being so rough and new, also make improvement very cheap and rewarding. So people can set to work solving problems and improving profitably again for a while before diminished returns set in once more.

Innovation then, at the macro level, is literally forestalling the otherwise inevitable implosion of society, keeping its means for dealing with all of its challenges cheap enough to be worth the effort.

At the micro level, which is the point from which I experience things, it just makes the world a more interesting and fun place to be from day to day. Solving big, rewarding problems is a lot more exciting than solving small problems with little reward.

Whichever way you look at it, we need difficult ideas, ideas that force us to question everything we take for granted. We need big, new problems, a continual stream of them, to keep us engaged, and to keep our work rewarding. We need this more than we need improvement, really. Improvement is essential, but it is also a given - we are creatures of improvement, we do it naturally and consistently on whatever is placed in front of us. Innovation is more of a wildcard, a mutation - it happens sporadically, not necessarily when you need it and are hoping for it.

Which of course makes us love it all the more.

I stumbled on a definition of innovation by chance the other day, and it blew my mind. It said:

Innovation occurs when someone uses an invention - or uses existing tools in a new way - to change how the world works, how people organize themselves, and how they conduct their lives.

then:

Many product and service enhancements may fall more rigorously under the term improvement (than under the term innovation).

Innovation is distinct from improvement in that it causes society to reorganize. It is distinct from problem solving and is perhaps more rigorously seen as new problem creation.
[emphasis mine]

Innovation is the creation of new problems in need of solving. I’ve always agreed with that idea, without ever knowing it consciously. Improvement, then, is what comes after innovation. It is the solving of the problems created by innovation. Innovation is a radical leap in thinking, improvement is the linear filling in of the spaces created by that leap. The two are very different, though they go hand in hand.

It’s a distinction that is for the most part lost on people. Does it matter that we understand the difference between innovation and improvement? I think it does. I’ll try to write something on why it matters soon.