OK, lately, I've been about as active as a hibernating bear in a perpetual winter. I aim to change that.
Here is an article from the wonderful site
www.medium.com, about a woman who, as a child, was trapped in poverty and a difficult family situation and lifted herself out by learning (from books, no less) to become a successful and inspiring entrepreneur.
Two major lessons from this:
- Read books
- Identify/create the trigger: comfortable people don't change - step outside your comfort zone or risk eventually dying in boring 'done-nothingness'.
https://medium.com/the-internet-of-women/meet-the-woman-whos-created-the-21st-century-finance-model-for-emerging-technologies-6eb242b41f9c (Source)
Meet the Woman Who’s Created the 21st Century
Finance Model for Emerging Technologies
Riva-Melissa Tez is
the CEO and co-founder of Permutation in San Francisco. A London native, she
runs an artificial intelligence platform and incubator. In her spare time, she
works on The Longevity Cookbook, alongside Maria Konovalenko and Steve Aoki, which is a book that distills academic
research into practical measures for slowing the aging process. This is an
edited transcript of a recorded interview.
I learned important lessons about money at a very
early age.
At 10, I moved into a homeless shelter after my
father left my mother. My mother is severely schizophrenic — which can be both
chaotically fun and devastatingly traumatic — and was not well enough to look
after herself, let alone me at the time. Amongst other things, she used to make
me drink the milk in the morning first to check if it had poison in it. A few
years later, at 14, we moved into social housing. We lived in this horrible
apartment that had no curtains or carpets. At one point I realized, “Oh, money
is how the world works.” It’s a lesson you don’t learn at school.
I received a scholarship to attend a prestigious
all-girls school. The girls at my school came from quite wealthy families, so I
never told anyone where I lived. I would take different routes walking home so
that no one knew where I was going.
Once I realized that money was the key to an
escape, I started reading books on consumer psychology. Edward Bernays, who was
the nephew of Sigmund Freud, was a great inspiration for me. At 15, I managed
to get a job selling outdoor sinks at a furniture trade show. The job initially
belonged to my older sister, but on her first day of work she humorously fell
asleep on the job and was promptly fired. The company told her to find a
replacement, so I begged her to let me do it.
My sister lied and said I was 16. I ended up
selling these sinks at a trade show from 9am to 9pm for three weeks straight. I
developed my own strategy to improve my learning: I would read books on sales
and then go test theories out when I was working. Later, I would update my
model of consumer psychology, which I kept track of in a notebook. In this way,
I used very rapid AB testing to learn about sales.
I sold more at that trade show than the entire
management team, earning £15,000 in commission, which was more money than I
could even fathom at the time considering my mother and I lived on £60 a week.
I had truanted school to accommodate the job and was in a lot of trouble, but
my grades were good and, to be honest, I didn’t really care much about school
at the time. I saved the money and was able to eventually move my mother out of
our awful apartment into a beautiful one-bedroom place in West London, where
she still lives today. I have paid her rent every month since then. I owe her
for a lot of my thinking, so I could never abandon her. Those struggles she put
me through gave me a high tolerance for risk and stress, which I am extremely
grateful for.
People sometimes ask what made me ambitious at a
young age. The motivation was simple: we were literally so poor that I had to
find a way to make money for my mother. There’s no secret sauce; it was just
pure desperation. There were times when we couldn’t even afford to eat.
I attended University College London and switched
from a joint honors to straight Philosophy, with a focus on epistemology and
logic. My mother’s condition got me hooked on trying to understand how humans
justify their beliefs.
Whilst at University, I was living above an empty
shop in Notting Hill, which is an affluent area in London. During my time
there, I noticed there were many families living in the neighborhood. One day,
I suggested to my boyfriend at the time that we should open a pop-up toy store
in the empty store below. We followed through, and surprisingly we did very
well — so much so that we launched a permanent store. Eventually our shop
expanded, taking over the two stories. Our toy store still stands today. It
just celebrated its sixth birthday.
At 21, I got more serious — I thought, “wait, but I
don’t want to run a toy store for the rest of my life…” I wanted to learn how
to do things digitally. I used to get into trouble for hacking stuff off
computers- I was very much the kind of teenager who would stay up all night on
a computer. This was all inspired by my father- he is a Professor of Electrical
Engineering. Before he left my mother and I, he used to make me build computers
and watch him code when I was very young.
After I left the toyshop, I moved to Berlin with a
mission to further my software skills. After a few months into this endeavor, I
had the idea of building a creative social network for kids. I worked on it
with an American co-founder and ended up staying in Germany for over two years.
At one point, I read Kevin Kelly’s What Technology Wants and
got really interested in emerging technologies. I wanted to find people to
discuss ideas with, so I started a nonprofit called Berlin Singularity which
hosted talks and events. I also started teaching as a lecturer at two business
schools, mainly on consumer psychology but also on entrepreneurship. Some
friends and I entered and won the LinkedIn Hackathon, which is still one of my
favorite memories from Berlin.
Michael Vassar, who at the time was running the
Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence in San Francisco came to give
a talk for Berlin Singularity. After his talk, I complained to him that I had
this sense of imposter syndrome. What I meant by this was- the idea that people
were regarding me as some sort of European expert on emerging technology
horrified me. I remember seeing myself in this magazine listed as one of the
top influential people in technology in Germany and I kept thinking, ‘But I’m only
21 and don’t know anything!’ I remember Michael telling me that I would enjoy
the intellectual climate in San Francisco.
A few months later, I was in a near-death car
accident on the autobahn. I got admitted into hospital with a bad concussion
and kept thinking about how much I wanted to learn about the world. A few days
later, I left my house, start-up, and boyfriend behind in Berlin and flew to
San Francisco.
An interest furthered by the near-death experience,
my original plan was to study how I could contribute towards life extension and
regenerative medicine. To begin, I started profiling all of the biotech
companies I found interesting. Trying to fulfil the challenge I set myself in
the hospital to learn about the world, I also picked up a hobby of reading a
lot of physics papers. To this day, I find them very humbling.
Eventually I began to work with investors who
wanted to put their money in emerging biotech opportunities. As I started to
undertake technical due diligence on different companies, I realized that
solving scientific challenges depended on the strength of tools and resources
that researchers have at their disposal. It was then that I really hit on
machine learning and artificial intelligence. I kept thinking, well, if you
could improve AI resources, you could use it to solve complex problems — such
as those in biotech and energy provision, among other industries. AI has the
potential to make the scientific process cheaper and better. It
has the power to reduce complexity, which is an idea I think about all the
time.
Once I hit on AI, I knew what I had to work on. I
believe AI is fundamental to improving humanity’s odds of survival because
humans are limited in their scope of skills for problem-solving. The only other
option would be intelligence-amplification en masse.
The subjects that we work with tend to all fall
under the STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Math) categories that
already have poor gender rates. I think the disparity is improving today,
because there are more opportunities to learn about engineering for children.
Today, there are so many children’s toys that
promote engineering for girls. This is in sharp contrast to 10 or 20 years ago.
Today, we’re at a point where we are just ahead of the curve in getting women
into STEM subjects. I believe the ratios will balance — it’s just a matter of
time.
Frequently, I’m the only woman speaker at an event
or on a panel. I recently shot an ad campaign for Microsoft where I was the
only female. People ask me what that’s like all the time, but most of the time
I don’t even notice. Sometimes I get spoken down to, but I just play into it.
At this one high-profile investment event, guys kept asking me where my husband
was, I guess it was impossible for them to believe a 26-year-old female could
be an invited guest. I told them that he had stepped outside to make an
important business call and made a note to never work with those people. I
don’t feel a need to justify myself.
Creating a 21st Century Finance Model
When I first came to the Bay Area, I was working
with two kinds of groups: investors who wanted to put their money in biotech,
and startups that wanted help raising money for their projects. As a philosophy
graduate, I didn’t know a lot about fundraising.
I spent a great deal of my time learning about how
venture capital funds work. The traditional fundraising model didn’t make much
sense to me. I saw it this way: as a VC, you’re basically a kind of middleman
who invests in startups. You represent other people’s money, which means you
have to answer to their particular interests. But, at the same time, you also
need to negotiate the interest of startups and their entrepreneurs. I was
pretty open about telling people in asset management that I didn’t entirely
understand some of their models, and that some of them might be more imperfect
than others. Then, someone rightly challenged me on how I would do it
differently. I told him I would learn everything I could about venture capital
and attempt to create a new model.
I left America and spent nearly three months in
France reading about venture capital, including all of the venture capital
reports from the Kauffman Foundation for the last few decades. At the
beginning, I didn’t even know what a Limited Partner was. At the end, I could
breakdown the IRRs of the top VC funds for the last ten years. I just studied
everything I could and concluded that the model of traditional venture
capital didn’t work for the kind of projects that interested me. It works well
for consumer tech, but it doesn’t work as well if you want to do anything long
term.
I wrote a few posts about how we should reshape
finance. My posts got over 250,000 views. As a result, a couple of big investor
groups were interested in hiring me. I found that ironic, but then again
everyone loves a contrarian. Among those who reached out to me was Peter
Bruce-Clark, who was working at Stanford looking at innovative
investment models. I ended up spending much of my time talking to him. He
walked me through some papers, including research on new models for investment
funds that he himself had been building, which were very impact-focused. I
decided I wanted to do the same thing for AI and began working with two others
on fleshing out that model- which was a hybrid impact investment fund.
My original goal was to raise these funds to
specifically invest in artificial intelligence. This was about 18 months ago.
During this time, a very smart investor and mentor said to me, “The bottleneck
in solving problems like the advancement of AI isn’t a lack of capital. The
problem is a lack of valuable deal flow.” Essentially, he told me that I wasn’t
tackling the real problem. It was a major shape-shift for me.
I decided to take another six months to model the
AI ecosystem. I wanted to learn about where talent goes, the flows of capital
between companies and investors, why certain companies are built, and why some
ideas don’t get off the ground.
One of the problems is investors don’t understand
much about research-driven machine intelligence since it’s extremely technical.
I saw a market gap for better due diligence tools as well as a gap in the
provision of services geared to assist early-stage development of AI companies.
It’s a much better, more valuable use of my time to ensure we have lots of
smart AI investors rather than trying to launch a standalone fund.
That’s how Permutation ended up being developed. I
created a suite of tools– which we’re launching soon- which helps investors
with some tricky decisions. I’m also trying to introduce investors to more
hardware-based projects. People focus on top layer innovation- such
as algorithms- without recognizing that the very thing that sets the parameters
for improvement is the hardware. I’m lucky that I can call up
my father when I need some help understanding a quantum computing paper.
The second thing we’re doing is investing in and
incubating early stage AI companies. It’s a very compelling message
when you go back to investors and can demonstrate how you’ve built tools to
measure your returns and your ecosystem impact. Typically, you raise a
fund and then you try to do that (or perhaps at least pretend
you care about impact). We did all of the research first and remain extremely
research-driven in our investment model and thesis. Nobody we’ve approached for
funding thus far has said no.
Peter, who helped me learn about measuring impact
returns, left Stanford and is now my business partner and closest friend.
There’s a lot of hype right now around AI, so while
there are many interested investors, we’re seeking smart ones that pass
different integrity tests. It’s the same for the people we hire. I’m looking
for impact-driven individuals and groups who genuinely care about making the
world better. Making money isn’t as hard as creating a positive global impact,
although capital can certainly fuel the strength of impact. Unfortunately, I
think most people realize this in life when it’s far too late and wish they had
done more with their time-slice of existence. I’ll retire when I die- and I’m
not really planning on doing that either.
Incentives and Collaboration
Last year, I went through a bout of depression
because it bothered me to see how little people in power didn’t collaborate to
solve some of our grandest challenges. There’s too much ego and opposing
forces, not to mention incentive structures that work against us. I kept thinking:
how can you make collaboration easier without losing the value you have as a
company or the impact you have as an individual?
We haven’t quite worked out how the human mind
works well enough to understand how to manage incentives. The problem is, we incentivize
people not to collaborate with others. You collaborate within
your own group or within your company, but if someone does something similar to
you, you want to deliberately withhold information from them. It restricts
everyone and restricts innovation. This kills research progress.
Things I would like to see:
The reshaping of incentive structures: We really need to improve incentive
structures between groups. How can we give other people access to fundamental
research? When you read academic papers, researchers are incentivized to keep
private the exact details that would explain the breakthrough. I’m opposed to
people being private about discovery, even though I understand it would be
suicide to do the opposite. I love today’s emphasis on being open source, but
we need more incentives for following through. Right now, you need to be
altruistic or charitable to be open source. There is no cost benefit. We don’t
live in a world where individuals get rewarded for contributing to society.
Instead, the message is, contribute to your own thing and you’ll be rewarded
for it. Then use that money to contribute to society. That process is too slow
in my mind.
For many companies, their value lies in their
intellectual property. If you give that away, you’ve given away the value of
your company. Imagine if everyone shared datasets. And… what if you had people
doing it to benefit humanity? That would take global coordination and a
redistribution of power, and I think that’s probably the biggest challenge of
the next 100 years. I also believe AI will help with solving this, but that’s a
whole another topic.
Supporting other women: Maria Konovalenko is one of my closest
friends and one the most famous faces of regenerative medicine. I met her
whilst I was working in biotech a few years back and to be honest, originally I
found her to be very intimidating. She used every opportunity to publicly
advocate for life extension. When we first met, I was much more timid and
didn’t know what to make of this. As I spent more time with her when she moved
to the Bay Area, I came to find she’s vocal because she cares so much about wanting
to solve aging.
She’s working on a PhD now and spends her days in a
lab dissecting flies to test out ideas. She wakes up at 5 a.m., goes to the
gym, and dissects flies all day. At night, she’s advocating for life extension.
In her spare time, she’s working on a book with Steve Aoki, called The
Longevity Cookbook, that I’m also helping with. It’s a user-friendly book
that people can read to learn more about the topic. I’m writing a chapter on
how artificial intelligence will revolutionize biotech research, such as the
use of neural networks to simulate drug discovery. I live for that kind of
development.
What I’ve learned from my friendship with Maria, is
the best thing we can do is speak up. I used to publish articles under a
pseudonym. Now, I write under my own name as a female in the space in the hope
that people can relate to me in some way.
I also want people to realize that you can be
interested in these naturally academic areas and still have a lot of
fun. I refuse to
play up to the false idea that you have to be boring to be professional. The
environment in our office is extremely fun. By that, I don’t just mean we have
a table-tennis table. If I think a brainstorming session would be better held
at the Zoo, then I’ll hold it there. Life’s too precious to not enjoy every day
that you get.
The next century will be critical for humanity’s
progress. Doing my bit
and speaking up about the challenges ahead is a responsibility that gets me out
of bed every morning. At night, I think about all the future people of the
world and the opportunities and risks ahead, how big the universe is and about
different spectrums of time.
It makes trivial matters seem very small indeed.
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