The gender gap in IT will take many years to balance out because the pipeline has to be built through early education but that doesn’t mean that women’s voices can’t be heard until there is parity in numbers, pay and expectations. 

The best way to teach others is by example and there will be plenty of inspirational stories told at the event and plenty of speakers showing that woemn can be successful at large tech companies despite their lack of numbers in the workforce. 

The conference certainly lives up to its title. Top female executives from Microsoft, Facebook, Oracle, Salesforce and American Express, will be joined by peers based in Berlin and Dubai. 

Ulyana Zilbermints, vice president, at conference organizer Avenue Code, said the event will “celebrate the movement of women leadership in technology.”

Zilbermints says she has successfully managed a life as a Silicon Valley executive, a business owner, while being a mother to twins -- now seven years old. She’s mentored many women based on her experiences and the challenges that came at different stages of her life. She says that now she is nearing forty she is able to approach leadership much more authentically. 

Fariba Rawhani, CIO ofTeranet, and one of the conference speakers, said. “It’s very important that we women support one another and send the message that it’s okay to be successful and ambitious; it’s okay to want to expand our horizons and do more. Always remember that women have a sisterhood.”

The conference grew out of a webinar series that interviewed female business leaders from the US, Brazil, Canada, Germany, Mexico, and the Middle East.

The event will have a Startup track where VCs and Angel investors will hear new business ideas. And a track where women can find mentors and advisors. 

The overall goal is to provide opportunities for women to create connections with their peers and with influential executives. It’s the best way to fast-track a career that’s been likely delayed by COVID-19 measures that have resulted in the absence of meetups and conferences -- for more than 20 months -- by the time this December conference arrives in San Francisco. 

There’s a lot of catching up to be done. 

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Guest post by Carol Strobel, operating partner at Redpoint eventures and a veteran of Brazil's startup ecosystem.

Latin America has been known as an emerging economy for decades. 2021 could be when it hits its stride.

The phrase "emerging markets" was coined by World Bank economist Antoine Van Agtmael to describe certain countries’ economies with significant GDP growth to support a growing middle class, and with stable and sustainable rates of economic growth spanning decades. 

Latin America’s stability and sustainability issues for their economies have repeatedly discouraged investors since the 19th century. But hard times breed tough companies, and Brazilian giants such as AB InBev have emerged that compete on global terms -- not on local regional comparisons. 

The pandemic, even with Brazil being one of the hardest hit countries in the world, has helped startups move ahead and accelerated growth of the digital economy. This will set the stage for clearing major challenges that have kept Brazil from blooming into a more mature and stable economy.

For example, countries like Brazil, Colombia and Mexico have been handicapped in building a mature innovation ecosystem due to very high interest rates and a persistent lack of financial inclusion for many small businesses and their customers. 

These four tech sectors: e-commerce, edutech, fintech, healthtech -- are poised to raise the prospects for Brazil and the rest of Latin America with a potentially significant impact on the region’s global ranking.

The hottest investment sectors in Latin America: 

1. On-demand delivery comes of age -- spurred by Covid-19 necessity

Buoyed by the global pandemic and three converging trends -- “rising smartphone penetration rates, improving internet infrastructure and large youthful populations,” e-commerce has skyrocketed in emerging markets during 2020, according to a recent Nasdaq.com guest post. 

In September, research firm Forrester forecast e-commerce will spike by 15.6 percent in Latin America during 2020, while retail sales in the region will contract by nearly four percent.

As of four years ago, early Latin American e-commerce entrepreneurs such as Buscape co-founder and Redpoint eventures' partner Romero Rodrigues saw a big opportunity for O2O commerce growth due to the continent’s significant experiential differences between online and offline services compared to more mature markets.

“There are numerous daily tasks that can be solved with ease in the U.S. In comparison, the lack of training, standardization and process in Brazil creates chronic inefficiencies in the service sector that push consumers to prefer and use mobile applications that provide everyday services in a standardized manner,” wrote Rodrigues back in June 2016.

Fast-forward four years to the end of 2020, and that forecast has proven true with a quadrupling of e-commerce sales in Latin America from about $22 billion in 2016 to nearly $84 billion in 2020, per eMarketer.

As Brazil and other Latin American countries locked down for most of 2020, food delivery has been a bright spot for on-demand delivery and the sector’s seen some of the region’s largest funding rounds in foodtech/delivery companies from investment giants such as Naspers and SoftBank. 

In its latest earnings report, Naspers reported 141 percent revenue growth in food delivery and a 69 percent boost in retail between March and September.

Prosus, the European tech giant spun off from Naspers last year, had a standout investment performance in Naspers most recent earnings report: iFood, the online food delivery portal and mobile app based in São Paulo, which grew its revenues by “234 percent YoY with KPIs including order frequency and order value hitting record levels.” Prosus is a majority shareholder in iFood.

With such lucrative investor returns, there will be heightened interest in Latin America’s e-commerce markets during the year ahead.

2. Online education is ripe for reinvention and rapid growth

How we convey knowledge and prepare people for the new jobs of the future has been totally upended in 2020 for students of all ages. Edtechs, which have not grown as fast in years past, are now well-positioned for rapid expansion during 2021. No longer a secondary learning option, digital education platforms are now on the front line to broadly educate, inform and retrain workers.

One big driving force behind the shift in edtech moving from a perk to a necessity for adults is the new trend of “reinventing workers” for a post-COVID economy - especially in the service industries where many jobs will not be coming back, at least anytime soon.

Similar to the U.S. where training programs aim to teach new skills for different types of jobs, numerous programs have sprouted up in Brazil and other parts of Latin America to train the workforce of the future.

Some NGOs and private companies have begun innovating new ways of attracting and teaching STEM skills to more diverse groups of people. 

For example, in the wake of government funding cuts to public education scholarships earlier this year, Ester Borges Santos, a 22-year-old from São Paulo, recently co-led the launch of a virtual study group program to create new learning opportunities for young women of color interested in STEM careers after the COVID-19 crisis hit.

Marcelo Sales, one of Latin America’s best known serial entrepreneurs, realized that Brazil was not keeping up in the race for an AI-based economy. His AI startup Cyberlabs partners with university and government-funded AI labs in Brazil to advance research and education.

Such efforts by private companies combined with government reforms have led to a turnaround for Brazil which is emerging as a world-class AI innovation hub.

With the future of high-paying jobs in Latin America hinging on access to more talent with STEM training and skills and so many major challenges that need to be addressed in the region through innovation, online education will continue to grow and show real impact, especially during the continuing lockdown during the first half of 2021 until we all move forward into a new normal.

3. After a five-year boom, fintech is paving the way to financial inclusion

For more than five years, the fintech sector has attracted the most VC dollars in Latin America with more than $220 million invested in Latin American fintech startups last year alone, according to LAVCA. 

Despite the economic crisis created by the global pandemic, fintech investment is still going strong in 2020. In fact, Oyster Financial, a Mexico-based neobank for SMBs, raised the largest seed round in Latin American history in September. In total, Brazilian fintechs have skirted the current crisis and have raised more than $1 billion during 2020.

The open banking movement, which was led by Europe and the U.K. in 2016, was quickly adopted using a similar model in Latin America that has been led by Brazil, Chile and Mexico.

Traditional banks in Latin America have not served the broad population well enough. At the end of 2018, about 70 percent of Latin Americans did not have access to a bank account due to bureaucratic complications.

Also, some banks only let people open an account if they’re in the top 20% income bracket.

While consumer-facing neobanks such as Brazil-based Nubank, the largest in Latin America, have been in the investor and media spotlight for a number of years, the end of 2020 has brought more investment interest in B2B neobanks. In early September, venture capitalists placed a combined $121.8 million in B2B fintech startups - including Anchanto, Deel, Oyster Financial, Salaryo and Thunes - in one week alone.

Without the ability for small and medium-sized companies to access basic financial services such as business accounts, debit and credit cards, or loans, there’s little hope for the economy in Latin America to bounce back after the current economic crisis.

“SMBs in Mexico need a fintech operating system and not another bank,” according to Vilash Poovala, CEO and co-founder of Oyster Financial in a recent interview. “We had to get a debit card by actually creating our own startup. It’s been 20 months, and we tried to get a debit card from some of the largest banks. Five times we went to a particular bank during COVID, and five times they had the debit card attached to the wrong company.”

With so many potential new jobs created and a major contribution to GDPs, fintech innovation promises to transform emerging markets while being a financial force for good that powers the “rise of the rest” through a more level playing field for all, while rewarding investors with returns.

4. Brazil’s healthtech sector continues to be red hot

The healthtech sector in Brazil emerged as an investment hot spot back in 2018. Similar to the fintech sector, the pandemic has accelerated the digitization of healthcare based on necessity. With a need to distance people socially from a safety perspective and a shortage of hospital space, the transition to e-prescriptions, telehealth and remote monitoring has spiked in Brazil.

A new report by think tank Distrito shows that more than $93 million has been invested in Brazilian healthtechs between January and October, which is up by more than 50 percent than in all of 2019. In October alone, there was $25 million invested in four Brazilian healthtechs.

According to a WHO bulletin: “Until the 1970s, Brazilians used to joke that they had to die before the authorities paid any attention to them.” Certainly, under the strain of the pandemic, the lack of broad access to healthcare is no laughing matter. 

For many years in Brazil, there have been massive inequities in access to healthcare services, serious problems with the quality of care, and burdensome bureaucracy and high costs that can be vastly reduced through investments in innovation.

Covid-19 has hit poor communities the hardest and Brazil’s healthcare system is plagued by inequality. An analysis of public data shows that Covid-19 patients in Mare’s favelas are dying at a rate that is three times higher than Rio’s wealthy Leblon district.

Healthtechs have exploded in the region to deliver better options from healthcare on demand, telehealth and mobile apps to digitizing medical records and prescriptions. And the Covid-19 pandemic has presented a grand challenge to healthcare startups to develop truly valuable services.

Looking ahead:

Tackling large social problems like education, finance and healthcare in emerging markets makes a lot of sense because with new technologies there are always opportunities to leapfrog ahead.

Plus: with so much “blue sky” for growth and upside, the potential return on investments is huge. And with dozens of tech "unicorns" valued in the billions of dollars emerging in greater numbers, Brazil and its neighbors are showing they now have a large startup ecosystem and experienced teams that know how to build companies on a global scale.

Investors invest in teams and that explains the rise in global and corporate interest in Latin America. 

With that larger level of investment comes the rare opportunity -- and responsibility -- for Latin American startups to compete globally while acting locally to the benefit of the societies and economies of an entire region and which will be relevant for a long time. 

. . .

Carol Strobel has been a Brazilian tech ecosystem and startup innovator for more than a decade, including years of experience as the legal director of Intel Capital for Latin America. She currently serves as an operating partner at Redpoint eventures, the first Silicon Valley VC fund on the ground in Brazil as of 2012.

Disclosure: Redpoint eventures has invested in CyberLabs and Oyster Financial.

Tech workers marching at Gay Pride San Francisco 2019

Guest post by Luciana Carvalho, VP of People and Performance at Movile

Surviving in the post-lockdown economy is going to be the most important test that many business leaders have ever faced. It is during such extraordinary times that we will find out if our management best practices are indeed the right practices for these novel circumstances and what needs to be adjusted.

A widely accepted tenet of management teachings is that building a strong company culture is very important because it acts as a strong foundation for the entire organization.

Companies with a strong culture have a competitive advantage. Daniel Coyle in his best-selling book “The Culture Code” makes the case that the secret behind highly successful teams is due to company culture. Coyle offers the example of Overture, which invented pay-per-click advertising. Google ended up acquiring Overture because its company culture allowed its teams to move faster and grow bigger.

We are about to discover if company cultures can keep businesses afloat during times of extreme crisis. Is a company’s culture sufficient to weather the storms? What are the factors for keeping teams motivated during extraordinary times with unpredictable outcomes? What can be done to strengthen company culture? These have become common questions within every type of organization.

I’d like to share some insights from my career, which I think can help strengthen company culture and improve the odds of survival during these harsh times.

Leaders are the example

It may seem obvious that leadership is important in times of crisis but it is doubly important because that’s when people notice it the most.

Gianpiero Petriglieri, a researcher in leadership, recently wrote an article about “toxicity of leaderism and … the harm it causes.” He argues for elevating the role of managers to leaders. It is “what we need most of all and yet continues to elude us. That is, competent managers who are entrusted to lead.”

Whoever does the job of leading will need to do it for the entire organization. They need to set the tone, the energy, and be able to communicate a strategy of moving forward to every part of the organization.

For example, among the CEO’s many leadership duties is being a “Chief Excitement Officer” because motivation cascades down from the top. And the CEO needs to be in touch with everyone: internally with staff and suppliers and externally with customers and investors.

As in wartime, employees instinctively look to their leaders for information, like should they be scared about their jobs or should they be vigilant about competitors? They need real information. It needs to be brutally honest because anything else damages trust.

I’ve seen this type of transparency in information become an important strategy in strengthening company culture during tough times ― and Brazil has had plenty of downturns and political instabilities; many more than in western countries.

Communication with staff can be done through open dialogues with the entire organization, or by adopting new practices that then become a future habit.

The easy accessibility of leaders during critical times is very important because it helps everyone in the organization stay on the same page and it shows we trust our people, which in turn makes them feel more secure.

Here at Movile, we make videos where our leadership openly explains our positions on key matters and is able to preempt certain questions. We share stories of both success and failure because we believe there is as much, if not more, to learn from failures compared to success stories. This transparency strengthens our culture.

Which brings me to my next insight.

Transparency as a strategy

Transparency brings to mind something that is “crystal clear,” but this is rare because in reality, we are always in situations where nothing is very clear. So you must equip your teams with as much information as is possible. Tell them about the strategies, the next steps, and the immediate short-term actions needed.

Transparency in information is an extremely strategic practice especially when it is able to spread out the decision-making within the organization; when it gives team members the confidence that they have the best information to make the right decisions.

Otherwise, during times of crisis and fast-changing events, teams can become paralyzed with indecision. Transparency in information empowers teams because they understand how to move the business ahead.

Management updates should be communicated in an open forum with easy access for employees who are offsite or in overseas offices. This brings me to my next insight about work.

From systems of control to systems of results

The global COVID-19 lockdowns have forced every company to adopt and adapt to remote work because most team members need to remain at home. Not everyone was happy with this new normal because few organizations had the company culture that was comfortable managing remote teams.

A new fact of life is the potential return of lockdowns as future infectious waves emerge. This means every company needs to be super comfortable managing remote teams in their homes, and having work processes in place that support their productivity.

Management needs to recognize the additional pressures faced by their staff who are working from home; especially in households with young children.

Our regular systems of control based on hours does not take full advantage of the flexibility of remote workers. It is best to let them decide on how to organize their work and shift a company’s management priorities towards a system of results.

Jim Ludema and Amber Johnson at the Center for Values-Driven Leadership at Benedictine University, wrote that it is important for leaders to “trust their team members and validate that trust by watching organizational productivity, not hours. This allows them to celebrate their team’s performance without micromanaging the time clock.”

And a system of results helps build a culture of meritocracy where results and not favoritism are rewarded.

Preserve the core and build out the base

These harsh times are the best times to examine your company culture and decide what is core to it. And, how it can be strengthened through new practices.

Here at Movile, we are helping our people adapt to the crisis and deal with the pressures of working from home. This includes advice and warnings about medical issues and recognizing the mental health issues around loneliness and anxiety.

We are also experimenting with various tools and processes because we’ve been forced to move all our office interactions into virtual worlds. We are still trying to figure out how to celebrate our successes with virtual champagne, and how we can virtually recreate those interactions during coffee breaks when we are not in the same building.

Adopt and adapt

The best company culture for these times is one that is highly adaptive and readily able to adopt new ways of working. During times of crisis, every company responds differently. There will be new rites and rituals and new habits established. New ways of winning will be found. And new practices such as transparency in information will bond teams together in spirit and purpose so they can successfully tackle hard challenges.

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Luciana Carvalho is VP of People and Performance at Movile, an investor in an ecosystem of leading technology companies it operates globally from its headquarters in Sao Paulo, Brazil. Carvalho is one of the chief architects of The Movile Way, a methodology taught at Harvard and Stanford universities for building high-performance teams and a culture that is encouraged to take risks, be fearless, and dream big.

The SV Forum Visionary Awards used to be my favorite Silicon Valley summer event. These were small outdoor gatherings maybe 150 to 200 people, and usually held in the substantial backyard of some fabulous Woodside mansion — but always with incredible iconic names standing just a few feet away.

For example, the above photo shows the four (male) Visionary Award winners from eight years ago: Far right is Elon Musk, next top VC Jim Breyer; technology journalist David Kirkpatrick, and educator Salman Khan. The legendary VC Ann Winblad, is far left.

The casual atmosphere of the awards ceremony made for some excellent off-the-record conversations and excellent contact building for future on-the-record news stories.

Strangely, there was always very little press at this exclusive event — which I never understood because the access to key Silicon Valley figures was always off the charts.

And the backyard-casualness of the event was always a welcome break compared with the massive Silicon Valley trade shows and conferences during the rest of the year.

Sales Needs Contacts

Certainly, in the post-COVID world outdoor events will return faster than indoor conferences but both types of gatherings are off-the-table for an unknown length of time. This is very bad news for sales. Silicon Valley depends on shows and conferences for face-to-face meetings and for making new contacts. Enterprise IT sales take 18 months to two years on average to complete. This will be a tough for young companies that need to get their names out and don’t have many contacts of their own.

Silicon Valley Village

The casual nature of the Visionary Awards made it feel that Silicon Valley is really just a small village with a small population but under a global microscope. Here, we quickly get used to seeing people that in the rest of the world are considered unapproachable icons or geniuses — with great influence.

The Silicon Valley region deserves its reputation for innovation and as the home for many visionaries, it is a global engine of innovation. In recent years it’s shifting more into the global engine for scaling a business.

Sprint To Scale

Scaling is becoming the most important Silicon Valley specialty because you companies have a first-to-scale chance to dominate a sector because in online markets there’s usually very little room for large competitors to co-exist.

Bricks and clicks used to be a viable strategy but no longer. Bricks took years to build out a business which meant incumbent companies had time to adjust to any successful competitor and get a strategy.

Clicks allow you to scale in minutes… on demand. Expanding into new regions is easy without bricks and so it means that the best business model wins and wins quickly and dominates a sector. In the bricks world many competitors can co-exist for years even with bad business models.

The COVID-19 crisis has compressed this e-commerce trend as hundreds of millions of new users have flooded into online services of all types. It has had similar effects on the use of other technologies such as video-conferencing. The future is coming at us much faster than in the days pre-COVID-19. But this also means that all the societal problems associated with the future are rushing at us — and we have less time to fix them.

Future Problems Here

We used to think that we would have many years to deal with serious issues such as:

• How do we deal with mass unemployment from tech-related job losses for no fault of the workers?
• What is fair GIG economy legislation?
• How do we deal with rising inequality?
• How do we offer universal healthcare that can stop the spread of virus outbreaks?
• How do we safeguard against fake news and hate speech while preserving fundamental rights?
• How to do we protect democracy from abuses of tageted advertising data?
• How do we pay for professional journalism when ads and subscriptions are not enough?
• What are our privacy rights in contact tracing apps versus community safety? 

And many more questions need to be resolved if we are to transition into what is an inevitable and hopefully enviable future where we all share in the abundance created by our technologies. But we nead a new culture and lexicon because the future will be nothing like the world today. 

Virtual reality pioneer and author Jaron Lanier asked “Who owns the Future?" in his excellent book of the same name. But the way the future will turn out is more about who has a say — not just ownership. I don’t own my apartment but I have a say in how I live in it. We all share the same future. And that means shared responsibility for how we will live in that future.

Rather than getting out of the way of technology so it can find its own level in the economy — as many tech boosters have suggested — we have to make sure everyone shares in the benefits of technology.

There is no good reason for not doing this because fortunately, technology driven markets are deflationary — everything gets cheaper and can be offered at very low costs. (Jeff Booth describes technology’s deflationary effect in his groundbreaking recent book “The Price of Tomorrow” — review coming.)

Who Is Driving?

Our relationship to technology has been skewed by our language and how we write about it. We often describe inanimate technology as “the driver” of a particular trend. But an engine doesn’t drive a car. Humans drive and decide on the destination.

Our technologies are tools that will enable a fabulous future of our own design — as long as we know where we are going — which we don’t just yet.

The extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 crisis are boosting the use of new technologies across every industry and resulting in big organizational changes; all pushing us ever faster into a highly automated future.

Yet we still haven’t figured out how we will live in that future, and the legislation, culture, and economic structures that we will need to prosper. This is going to be a big but necessary discussion.

I wish us all luck in this endeavor because we’ll need it. Our societies change slowly — no matter how fast the world turns.

 Without events and conferences -- IT vendors are having to change how they reach potential customers. Above: Crunchies Awards 2013

Guest Post by Alex Shapiro  @AlexShapiroPR

The battle for influence and attention by the big vendors can’t stop just because of a crisis. So how are the big names of tech reaching their audiences in a time of media and industry upheaval?

The fact that you’re even reading this article at such a crazy time, shows how unpredictable the tech media landscape has become since the COVID-19 pandemic began. Having to focus on work, customers and productivity, while being supportive and empathetic to family, friends and our communities has been difficult for everyone.

By this point, everyone has also felt the effects: a lot of the people in the world lucky enough to be working remotely right now are stressed, online and eager to demonstrate value and productive-ness through pushing themselves and each other to do more. "According to Bloomberg and the findings of NordVP, Working From Home Means Working Longer Hours for Many. These added hours also seem to be showing up in the volume of announcements tech vendors are pumping out. 

This has hit the tech media world in a unique way. Many reporters shifted around to covering the endless flood of news breaking in every sector, including many like Frederic Lardinois at TechCrunch, who shifted to covering just Covid news. Though March now seems ages ago, back then, even Larry Dignan, the Editor in Chief of the venerable ZDNet, told Sam Whitmore, of Sam Whitmore Media Survey for his article ZDNet's Larry Dignan on Covid-19's Long-Term Implications, and What to Pitch | Sam Whitmore's Media Survey, "We don't want to become the Coronavirus Channel -- though some days we are... and some days we aren't."

It also seems like every company, think tank, expert, open source project, analyst and influencer has a platform around Right Now, what went wrong and where it's going. 

With everyone online, there’s no shortage of attention for news and views around tech. After all, isn’t there something soothing about the relatively low stakes of clouds and APIs, compared to the very real, real news? Some vendors have even reported huge turnouts at the Virtual Summits.

With more news and fewer writers to report it, vendors are upping their game in tipping the balance of attention in their favor.

As New York Times reported, in The Art of the Pitch in the Midst of a Pandemic - The New York Times, PR folks are also doing anything but leaning back during this noisy time.

So here are some highlights of tech storytellers’ clever tactics to cut through the noise and reach tech decision makers like you!

AWS Flexes its Muscles with AppFlow News

AWS isn’t even known for big splashy announcements. Instead, they typically pull out substantial, technical blogs and keep on rolling to Re:Invent, where Andy Jassy might show off a slide marking the staggering number of these updates, which spawned its own piece of great coverage back when I was in the cloud trenches. For a brand that’s known more for doing than talking, this 2016 vintage visual is a rare demonstration of the giant flexing its muscles (back when physical events were a thing).

Amazon re:Invent/Business Insider

https://www.businessinsider.com/why-amazon-aws-is-unstoppable-2016-11

https://i.insider.com/583f38cdba6eb67d058b6d63?width=1000&format=jpeg&auto=webp

That track-record makes it all the more unusual that AWS seemed to do an old school media push behind the launch of AppFlow, which was announced not just with a very visual blog post, but a combination of explainer video and video demo that made it to the editorial video sections of fine outlets like ZDNet’s. The results were a whole slew of prominent pieces in tech press, beyond usual AWS reporters, which seemed to create a bigger PR spike than the typical AWS product announcement. 

Google Explains AI Tech by Showing Instead of Telling

Google Cloud in the meantime has followed up their massive April push to get their bold multi-cloud Anthos support noticed by every tech trade publication, starting with this fine one, in glowing pieces such as Google Cloud's Anthos for AWS generally available, Microsoft Azure in preview.

A priority so strategic that it took actual robots, powered by AI, to follow that act. AI Algorithms are hard to explain because most people don’t have a PhD in what might as well be science fiction. So, when Google needed to explain ‘Deep Reinforcement Learning with Concurrent Control’ they did it by simplifying the heck out of what it does.with the unveiling of ‘Thinking While Moving’. This is a landing site white-paper that resembles a developer-style Medium post, with illustration, diagrams, animations and video of actual side-by-side robots and all the glorious technical detail that the AI community will need to bring. This announcement exemplifies how showing instead of telling together with demystifying jargon can bring even the most technical topics in the world to life for a broader audience. 

Oracle Shows Off Its Friends and Timeliness

As a popular journalist motto goes, ‘names make news’ and the Oracle Product Team certainly took full advantage of the opportunity to be associated with Zoom as that brand becomes a household name. The announcement that, “When the World turned to Zoom, Zoom turned to Oracle” achieved what few customer-selects-vendor announcements can do, securing prominent media coverage for a story that, by definition doesn’t yet have a middle or an end. Of course, it didn’t hurt the story’s appeal that Larry Ellison himself made maybe a first-ever YouTube appearance promoting the relationship entitled, Larry Ellison: Staying Connected - YouTube. (full disclosure, I’m a proud, Oracle Product PR alumni) 

- - -

Alex Shapiro is an enterprise IT PR and Marketing consultant. 

Photo: Paulista Avenue, São Paulo, Brazil.

Guest post By Eduardo Henriques, Movile Group co-founder and Wavy CEO

In the rainforests of Brazil, the incredible diversity of competing life forms includes the fire ant — a species that has learned to survive the most catastrophic floods by creating waterproof rafts of living ant bodies hooked together to trap air bubbles and keep their queen and larvae dry until a new site for the colony is found. A lone ant would quickly drown, but a community of ants helps each other survive.

This example of fire ants at work in Brazil’s natural ecosystem provides insights into a new model for startups that has worked well around the globe: a tech innovation and VC ecosystem composed of compatible and synergistic startups that are able to help each other survive downturns and setbacks of all kinds - and grow even faster as a collective during boom times.

It’s an approach to investing and new founder services that are being offered by smart VC funds on the ground in Brazil from around the world. It works well during good and bad times. This new approach is helping to establish Brazil as the red-hot forge of Latin America’s booming innovation economy with a dozen Brazilian startups out of 17 in Latin America today. Together, they represent the region’s most valuable companies. And, there are more of them on the way.

Even Mary Meeker, in her annual Internet Trends report, has started to include data on Latin America’s startups and the many market opportunities from a young and very tech-savvy population with a growing middle class that largely lives in massive urban areas such as the Brazilian cities of Florianópolis, São Paulo – or Sampa, as it’s often called, and Rio de Janeiro.

Advice for building fast-growth startups

Back in the early 2000s, Brazil was “unfriendly to technology entrepreneurs,” as my longtime friend and Movile co-founder Fabricio Bloisi describes it: 

“There was an incredible amount of bureaucracy that made starting and operating a business difficult in Brazil. The World Bank ranked Brazil 120 out of 187 countries for ease of doing business and 167 out of 187 for ease of starting a business. It was very difficult to grant stock options to employees and in the early 2000s, there was very little venture funding available for young organizations.” 

Times have improved, despite very tough economic conditions. Brazil’s startups know how to grow during tough downturns, far tougher than in North American and European economies. 

However, startups around the globe - from China to Silicon Valley to Europe - have had little experience with economic downturns; the most recent being about 12 years ago in 2008.

Economic downturns for Brazil's startups have come around more often and they are much deeper. In 2015, a savage, two-year recession cut Brazil’s GDP by a massive seven percent. And signs of an improving economy in 2020 could now be delayed or even completely derailed by the fallout from the coronavirus pandemic and the recent oil crisis.

This type of harsh investing environment requires Brazilian entrepreneurs to be frugal and smart about how to best use their investment capital. 

[Brazil's now vigorous startup sector has produced 12 unicorns out of 17 for the whole of Latin America at end of 2019.]

I remember in the 2008 crisis reading the infamous Sequoia Capital "R.I.P. Good Times" letter. We made a huge restructuring in the company and laid off about 30 percent of our people. It was a tough decision but we learned an important lesson about how to survive in tough times. 

Recently, Sequoia issued a warning to its portfolio startups that the coronavirus is “The Black Swan of 2020”. It looks like tough times for entrepreneurs are ahead but we know what to do. 

Here are some valuable lessons that we “fire ants” have learned from surviving downturns, recessions and other setbacks: 

Success Doesn’t Follow a Straight Path 

Over two decades, we have learned that success does not follow a straight line. Instead, it’s a messy squiggle, with ups and downs, sleepless nights, and a constant rethinking of strategy and planning in order to grow into a unicorn or a global company.

Silicon Valley founders are well versed in the concepts of fast failing and the lean startup methodology. That’s because the culture in Silicon Valley allows a quick recovery from failure.

Culturally, Brazilians are not wired for failure. We hate it. But in Silicon Valley, starting a business is generally a badge of honor -- even if it does not succeed in the end. 

When you’re not afraid to fail fast, you learn important entrepreneurial lessons more quickly, and you can move on to your next venture and apply what you’ve learned. You become successful by using the lessons of your failures. This is what we’ve tried to apply internally in terms of developing new ideas within organizations.

When startups mature and teams become much larger, we call them "cruise ships” or “transatlantic ships.” They are cash cows that demand perfectionism and greater efficiency. The lean startup approach is a smart way to continuously test out a vision, and market test products and services based on whether a sustainable business can be built around them, or not.

We have integrated this approach into a development program called “Jet Skis” - wherein we, as a company, vote on the most important initiatives, and then unleash a small team with cross-functional expertise to focus on that, fully, with a high degree of autonomy. 

If a Jet Ski project shows early success, we turn it into a “Speed Boat” and add more people and resources. If a Jet Ski fails, we lose little money and a little time, and we always learn something from the failure.

Invest In Culture, Dream Big, Control Costs and Be Ready to M&A

We have learned a lot from Anheuser-Busch InBev (AB InBev) the world’s largest brewing company. It was created by Jorge Paulo Lemann, a Swiss Brazilian businessman who now ranks as Forbes’ 35th richest person in the world and is the richest man in Brazil. Lemann merged two Brazilian breweries and added further companies through savvy mergers and acquisitions managed by his private equity firm GP Investimentos.

The lessons from AB InBev are in the disciplined management and control of costs, and the management process it uses to pursue very aggressive goals.

AB InBev invested heavily in building a strong culture described in an AB InBev case study, as “the establishment of an intense meritocracy, and a radical informality and openness symbolized by the smashing down of executives’ office walls to have them work side-by-side at large tables, their metrics posted publicly for all to see.” 

Merging two companies together successfully is very hard to do. Harvard Business Review discovered that most corporate mergers and acquisitions fail (between 70 and 90 percent). 

After making more than 40 acquisitions in 12 years, one of the most important lessons on making a success out of corporate mergers is to focus on the cultural fit between the two companies. It’s important to perform a deep analysis of company cultures as part of due diligence. The ones that have the most alignment are always the ones that work out the best.

-- It’s essential to be very critical and realistic about any synergies and how long it will take. At Movile Group, we call it “facing the brutal facts,” and it’s better to do this early in the evaluation of the merger. 

-- We spend a lot of time on cultural integration and building new traditions and processes together. We always create a detailed 100-day plan for those integrations which helps ensure that everyone is on the same page with that plan. 

-- An ambitious culture is not just about commercial gains — it’s fundamentally about improving the world. The most impactful way to attract the best talent is to have hard problems to solve and ones that could make a positive impact on a massive scale. The startups with the best cultures will always have less trouble recruiting top talent and will have far less staff turnover.

-- Also, we found that we do not need to consider competitors as enemies because they can become important partners allowing faster growth strategies. 

Hopefully, such lessons can help startup founders prepare for, and survive any setbacks during this time of global economic uncertainty in the weeks and months ahead. 

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Eduardo Henrique is CEO of Wavy and co-founder of Movile Group, a leading ecosystem of technology companies in Latin America with a big dream to make life better for more than one billion people through its apps.

Knowledge workers work such short hours on their actual jobs (three--ish hours) that tech has a very narrow window of application in people's day thus limiting the productivity benefits that can be delivered by such short useage. Tech cannot eliminate terrible business processes and pointless meetings.

This might explain the productivity paradox -- it's a work management problem first.

Global spending on IT will pass $5 trillion this year (IDC) yet there’s shockingly little evidence that higher technology spending improves business productivity — it often has the opposite effect and hinders productivity. The reasons for this productivity paradox are not clear and have perplexed economists for decades.

This Stanford University computer science site Productivity Paradox discusses possible reasons for tech's mysterious failing performance in the workplace -- such as difficulties in choosing the right metrics. Unable to find more compliant metrics these experts conclude that they "would like to believe that 'IT does matter””.

The trillions of dollars spent on IT means there’s a lot of believers but why can’t we find the productivity data in this age of Big Data? It’s frustratingly counterintuitive that technology advances over the past two decades have done nothing to budge worker productivity.

The immense irony that our IT productivity technologies hinder workplace productivity is difficult to accept. But there’s some interesting statistics in a recent report commissioned by Workfront, an enterprise software project management platform based in Utah.

The State of Work: 2020 report collected responses from 3,750 knowledge workers across four countries: US (1,500), United Kingdom (1,000), Germany (750) and the Netherlands (500).

They were asked about many different subjects such as their use of technologies, workplace habits and how much time they spent on different activities.

By far the most interesting part of the report was how little time employees said they were able to work on the primary duties. UK workers spent the least time: 40% — three hours out of eight hours doing the job they were hired for — with an average of 43% across all four countries.

It revealed an enormous productivity gap. The respondents blamed too many hours in pointless meetings, answering too many emails and dealing with distractions from constant interruptions at work.

It’s easy to see that certain collaborative technologies can be sources of distraction but this is minor compared to what is by far the biggest reason for the technology productivity paradox: there’s shockingly little time to do primary work.

Technology investments can't compete with what can be gained from simply eliminating inefficient work practices. Tech productivity investments can only be applied during the times people are working on their primary duties — which averages slightly over 3 hours in an eight hour day. It’s essentially a two-day work week.

This nearly 60 percent productivity gap revealed by the Workfront survey cannot be solved by technology. Which is why the productivity paradox persists. Bad workplace practices hold back productivity.

In the global digital transformation of business the competitive battles will be won by the organizations with the most efficient workflows — and that’s when productivity technologies will prove their worth.

In a letter from a group called Oracle Employees for Ethics addressed to "Dear Oracle Leadership," they write that Ellison's support for President Donald Trump is against the core values the company upholds in ethical conduct, diversity, and inclusiveness:

"[It] not only damages our brand perception and misrepresents the diverse views of our company, but it adversely affects the morale of the individuals and communities who comprise Oracle… we refuse to be complacent and complicit in Larry Ellison's support of such a divisive person."

Protests and walk-outs by Silicon Valley's tech workers have become more common over the past two years and have had success at Google, which shut-down a military AI project and pulled out of competing for a multi-billion dollar JEDI cloud computing contract from the Pentagon.

Microsoft won the JEDI contract, which could be worth as much as $10 billion, but legal action from Amazon has frozen the award. Amazon lawyers claim that Trump's enmity for its founder Jeff Bezos influenced the Pentagon's decision. Oracle has also protested the handling of the JEDI procurement and funded lobbyists critical of Amazon.

Over the past 10 years, the US tech industry has increased its lobbying in Washington DC spending nearly half-a-billion dollars, hoping to win big government contracts and to limit any damaging legislation.

The upcoming Trump fundraiser will provide Ellison with an opportunity to continue Oracle's lobbying efforts to win some of the Pentagon JEDI contract. Tickets are between $100,000 and $250,000 to play golf and get a photo with the President.

I came across iFood earlier this year at the well-attended BayBrazil conference in Silicon Valley where Fabricio Bloisi founder and CEO of Movile (photo:below), a Brazilian mobile apps and investment firm, was the keynote speaker. Bloisi is a colorful personality and he’s funny and humble considering all the success he’s had in business. 

Bloisi spoke about coming to Silicon Valley many years ago and the lessons he learned and took back with him to use in his many investments — Movile is one of the biggest shareholders in iFood. He said there were just 30 employees at iFood when Movile first invested. And he helped iFood apply the chief lesson he learned from his time in Silicon Valley: think big and develop a mission to improve the lives of more than a billion people.

Armed with that philosophy iFood has become a giant and the clear market leader in Latin American food delivery with more than 21.5 million monthly orders processed and 116,200 restaurants registered in 822 cities. 

According to a September Frost & Sullivan report on the worldwide online food delivery market, iFood had 86 percent market share in Brazil last year. The global consulting firm forecasts that Brazil will surpass $1.5 billion in online food delivery sales in 2019 and the value of the global market will soon be $200 billion. 

Bloisi predicted that artificial intelligence (AI) technologies will eventually make it possible for iFood-delivered meals to be cheaper than buying and cooking food at home. That’s a great example of setting big ideas — and then developing the innovation needed to get there. 

AI is at the core of iFood but not just in an elite inner-circle group of AI developers — the company this week announced that all employees of iFood and Movile — more than 3,000 — will undergo mandatory training in AI during 2020 beginning with what is AI, how to use it, what to use it for, and progressing to more advanced training. 

“Everyone is either directly or indirectly affected by AI,” said Carlos Moyses, iFood CEO. "If you’re on the sales team, AI is helping direct you to the best prospects. If you’re a member of the customer experience team, AI helps further augment the customer experience.” 

Because of this fundamental reliance on AI, the executive team decided it was "absolutely critical to be the first Brazilian company to help educate all of its employees to be experts in AI."

A newly formed group within the company called the AI Academy (an R&D lab) that was launched in April is now staffed with about 100 data scientists and related experts to develop AI technologies and work closely with various business units to solve the biggest problems and drive more rapid growth and market share. . 

In addition to AI-trained staff, here are several other current and planned innovative initiatives at iFood such as:

— The use of autonomous robots to help with food deliveries within large buildings or large campus-like areas. It’s a partnership with Brazil-based Synkar that will kick off early next year. 

— iFood has created its own digital maps which it uses to determine food-preparation times to improve its delivery predictions and to map out more efficient routes for its delivery partners. .

— It is the first in Latin America to use Amazon’s Alexa to select from menus and order food.

— It is able to monitor delivery partners and reward those that keep to posted speed limits.

— It has plans to use drone delivery but not to displace delivery partners, but to move food from kitchen to iFood hubs that can cut up to 12 minutes off current delivery times.

— It has set up internal, cross-functional teams to quickly find solutions to work-process inefficiencies and to develop new services.

iFood thinks of itself as a tech company: Brazil’s first foodtech giant..

Fabricio Bloisi’s focus on food is a genius move in terms of thinking hugely big. Food is intensely important to every person alive and is needed several times a day.  Food is core to our health and to maintaining the civil functioning of society. And it includes a vast populace of producers and consumers. It’s an opportunity to make an enormous impact in what is the world’s largest target market — the entire population of the world.

Fast growing startups are found in many parts of the world but that doesn’t mean Silicon Valley is going away.. Silicon Valley is where innovation comes to be scaled. It has the capital and it has the people with the right expertise to build startups into global giants. Manny of Silicon Valley's lessons can be applied by anyone anywhere but it's hard to replicate the culture of its venture capital community and its high tolerance for risk.

RTB House is a proud sponsor of the RTB-Warsaw MIMotaurs one of nine teams competing in a unique Artificial Intelligence (AI) competition — autonomous racing drones. And for the team whose AI beats an elite human pilot — there’s fame and fortune.

Guest post by Gary Burtka, VP of U.S. operations for RTB House

Drones promise to revolutionize commerce through the rapid delivery of goods to our doorsteps and lobbies. But the thought of these self-driving robots whizzing around above our heads and homes is a scary one for some people. It evokes images of futuristic movies like “The Fifth Element” and its skyway with vertical lanes full of speeding flying cars, and imagining the fear-inducing chaos if even just one vehicle flies off-course and crashes into others. And what of the people down below?

Safety is why Amazon, Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Tesla and others have been pouring money into development of advanced machine learning systems for delivery by drones. Another way to push forward the development of AI drone technology is through competition.

World’s first man vs. machine drone racing challenge 

The Drone Racing League (DRL) is trying to build NASCAR-like excitement around the sport of drone racing. Large audiences gather to see elite human pilots racing at high speeds via custom made drones through a variety of courses -- and the audience is in the racing seat.

Last year the DRL announced a new type of drone racing competition: the Artificial Intelligence Racing Circuit (AIRR) — with no human pilots. Teams create virtual pilots — AI systems that race along the same courses used in regular competitions. Will the machines learn to become faster pilots than humans?

Aerospace giant Lockheed Martin has put up millions of dollars in sponsorship and prize money as part of its AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge. Like other prize competitions such as the DARPA Grand Challenge, the AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge has the potential to develop safer and more efficient drone deliveries.

The AIRR competition attracted 430 teams of drone enthusiasts and developers from 81 countries. Now there are just nine teams remaining and this fall their drones will race through a series of complex 3D courses for $2 million in prizes. 

There’s a special $250,000 prize for the team that can beat a human pilot. 

University of Warsaw team is a top contender

One of the frontrunners in remaining AIRR teams is the Poland-based RTB-Warsaw MIMotaurs, from the University of Warsaw, well known for its AI education prowess.

AI has been booming in Poland and Warsaw is home to nearly one-half of the country’s AI startups and R&D divisions for global corporations. The University of Warsaw sits in the center of Poland’s main hub for AI innovation and attracts some of the best minds in the world. 

Karol Pieniący, captain of the RTB-Warsaw MIMotaurs, is determined to be the first AIRR team to beat a human pilot. Speaking at a recent event at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, he admitted that it’s a difficult task.

“The DRL human pilots are real pros at what they do, and we think of them as a geekier version of football stars in the drone racing sport that’s quickly moving towards the mainstream,” said Karol Pieniący. 

“Beating them will be extremely difficult, but we’re not giving up. There is a very good chance that our advanced AI will be able to compete with humans and eventually beat them in a head-to-head race.” 

Pieniący noted that they’re getting strong support from AI specialists at the University of Warsaw, in addition to mentors from Lockheed Martin who work with advanced control systems in the space industry. So, when the team asks its mentors for hints on how to solve a problem, they’re getting top-notch thinking for designing solutions that are “literally out of this world.”

So far so good

During preparations for the AIRR competitions, the RTB-Warsaw MIMotaurs were the only team that were able to start their drone engine, a standard configured quad-copter, fly up and make simple maneuvers. It was a magical moment for them plus it gave them an edge on the competition because now they had valuable data on flight-control responses.

Pieniący did not disclose any of the “secret sauce” that’s propelled them to the top of the AIRR finalists, which he says will stay closely guarded. He added that the world will soon find out which team has the most advanced AI.

This machine versus human competition will be a fast action-packed race. It’ll be more watchable than Google DeepMind playing and beating the world’s top player of Go. 

There’s millions of dollars and reputations at stake. And the team that beats a human pilot will not only make history but also get a lot of attention from the world’s largest tech companies.

Ultimately, these types of AI systems will be central to reinventing how we live, work and enjoy our leisure time.

---

You can follow developments and the evolving timeline and locations for the AlphaPilot Innovation Challenge here. To learn more about the RTB-Warsaw MIMotaurs and follow their progress, visit their Facebook page. 

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Gary Burtka is VP of U.S. operations for RTB House, that provides state-of-the-art marketing technologies for top brands worldwide. He is also a champion jet skier. RTB House’s AI platform is powered by deep learning algorithms to make ad campaigns more personalized and efficient. 

Carlos Brito, CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev (left), and Vinod Khosla, co-founder of Sun Microsystems and founder of Khosla Ventures, onstage at the “Brazil at Silicon Valley” event.

Guest Post: By Anderson Thees — Managing partner of Redpoint eventures

If the inaugural edition of the “Brazil at Silicon Valley” conference that took place in early April is anywhere close to a fair barometer, the smart capital of Brazil has now “woke” to the tech potential there in a material fashion. I’ve been a venture capitalist in Brazil since 2003, and it has been a privilege to closely witness the evolution of its entrepreneurial ecosystem. There’s been a beautiful blossoming in the last three years, including a first pack of unicorns running free last year. It should be no surprise to me that investors are paying attention. Still, when I walked into the event held at the Computer History Museum in Menlo Park, I was stunned.

Held over two days on April 8-9 in Mountain View, California, the event was organized by students and volunteers, under the impeccable leadership of Rodrigo Xavier, former CEO of both UBS Pactual and of Bank of America Merrill Lynch in Brazil. The event had an incredible lineup, covering the latest and hottest people and companies in tech investing and entrepreneurship.

Among the well-heeled and highly influential speakers were unicorn jockeys like David Vélez from Nubank and StoneCo Ltd. Chairman André Street. Other notable speakers included Jorge Paulo Lemann, co-founder of 3G, Carlos Brito, CEO of Anheuser-Busch InBev, Fernando Madeira, president of ipsy, Frederico Trajano, CEO of Magazine Luiza - one of Brazil’s largest retailers, and Mike Krieger, a Brazilian co-founder of Instagram, to name just a few.

But what impressed me, and most people there, was the caliber of people sitting in the audience. These were people you’d typically see on stage and then have them vanish from the venue after finishing their gigs. Not this time. Instead, they sat through sessions, took notes, and engaged eagerly in the Q&A sessions. This made the networking breaks as interesting as the content itself. Jokes about the vast wealth represented there were not rare: "We surely have one third of Brazil's GDP in that room.” Rich people were impressed that richer ones were there.

Building a Bridge from Silicon Valley to Brazil

In his opening speech, Hugo Barra, who’s now in charge of VR at Facebook, emphasized the importance of building a bridge between two of the world’s most important entrepreneurial epicenters: Silicon Valley and São Paulo, Brazil’s vibrant financial and tech-innovation center. In 2018, Barra left Xiaomi for Facebook and he previously led Android efforts at Google.

That goal of making key connections between Brazil and Silicon Valley has long been part of our mandate as investors, as well as the mission of BayBrazil, a Silicon Valley-based nonprofit founded in 2010 that serves as a source of information and a catalyst to connect the two regions. The lessons from Silicon Valley have been invaluable in accelerating the growth of Brazil’s tech ecosystem.

For example, the creation of Cubo, now the world’s second largest entrepreneurial hub in São Paulo, was inspired by trying to duplicate the likelihood of serendipitous encounters based on the sheer volume of entrepreneurs located in one place. Without a major hub like Silicon Valley’s Menlo Park, Cubo’s co-founders realized the pace of innovation would be stuck in low gear.

Certainly, the most successful entrepreneurs participating in the first “Brazil at Silicon Valley” are prime examples of promising startups who’ve bridged the two regions and networked with the Brazilian-American tech community.

A prime example is David Vélez, who was one of the featured speakers at the event. Prior to taking the helm of Nubank, which is Brazil’s third unicorn and currently valued at more than $4 billion after Tencent’s $180 million investment, Vélez worked at some of the most prominent investment firms and banks in the U.S. and graduated from Stanford University with an MBA.

Another presenter was Pipefy, a SaaS workflow platform founded by Alessio Alionco that is now used in more than 150 countries by enterprises such Accenture, GE, Visa and Volvo. Founded in Brazil, it now has its global headquarters in San Francisco and a tech development team in Curitiba, Brazil— something we are sure to see more and more of as Brazil-born startups continue to grow and expand internationally.

Mike Krieger, Brazilian co-founder of Instagram, compares the current scenario with Brazil 2010, when the app was released. He believes that, today, it could have been developed in the country.

What a Difference Five Years Makes

About five years ago, I recall a lively debate among VCs actively investing in Brazil at a similar, but much smaller event in Silicon Valley. At the time, the group was wagering whether the tech investing in Brazil had reached a total of a half-billion or a billion U.S. dollars.

Fast forward from five years ago to last fall, and in one of Latin America’s largest deals, Movile raised $400 million for its iFood delivery business. And, then, earlier this year Softbank announced a new U.S.$5 billion Softbank Innovation Fund for Latin American tech companies that it described as “the largest-ever technology fund focused exclusively on the fast-growing Latin American market,” per Crunchbase.

There was a funny moment during “Brazil at Silicon Valley” when Softbank CEO Marcelo Claure was asked how on Earth he could possibly deploy $5 billion in Latin America with the new fund. Claure answered with a chuckle that: “We believe $5 billion is a good start.”

Based on the first edition of McKinsey & Company’s new Brazil Digital Report, published and made available during the “Brazil at Silicon Valley” event, there’s good reason for bullishness.

According to the new report, the Brazilian economy has reached a “tipping point,” consumer and industry confidence are high and inflation and interest rates are at all-decade lows. Brazil’s capital markets are developing and diversifying funding for companies. IPOs have been on the rise. IT investment continues to grow faster than GDP, albeit a slow, steady pace. Pay TV and digital are the fastest-growing channels for media investments. E-commerce is growing. And, Brazil now accounts for 70 percent of the VC, private equity and private investment in LatAm.

One McKinsey & Company chart that really grabbed the audience’s attention, is that seven of the top-10 biggest market cap companies in the U.S. are big tech players including Alphabet, Amazon, Apple and Facebook. That’s simply not the case in Brazil today, but the opportunity is looming, large and compelling. One of the speakers forecast that in five years, at least half of Brazil’s largest companies will be tech companies.

I believe that this inaugural conference was the biggest gathering of Brazilians traveling to Silicon Valley that I have ever witnessed. The runner-up was a big group of about 250 Brazilian entrepreneurs attending TechCrunch Disrupt back in 2012 at the peak of Brazilian euphoria. But, at the “Brazil at Silicon Valley” event, there were all sorts of ecosystem players in the room. The very cream of the crop of top entrepreneurs, investors and corporations were all there.

During Disrupt 2012, we took the opportunity to launch our firm, throwing a party on the rooftop of the Transamerica Pyramid building were one of our Silicon Valley partners, e.ventures, is located. That party included a few Samba dancers. After Stanford conference, Mathias Schilling, co-founder of e.ventures, came to the important conclusion that next time around we’ll need a couple of floors, and a full Samba school formation during our party at BayBrazil’s annual “Brazil Week” that will take place in San Francisco in August this year.

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Anderson Thees is managing partner of Redpoint eventures, the Brazilian-focused arm of the Silicon Valley venture firms Redpoint Ventures and e.ventures.

Disclosure: Redpoint eventures is an early investor in Pipefy and a co-founder of CUBO. Anderson Thees is currently a board member of BayBrazil

Walking around the giant show floor at RSA I was struck by a thought: what a dismal industry this must be. If you are good at your job, you haven't created any new technology that makes processes more productive, or could be used to create new types of products -- you plug up the holes in the bucket that are known. You cannot reliably stop future attacks -- only the ones that are known. And all that work and cyber crime continues to grow and prosper.  

The cost of cyber crime is the loss itself-- predicted to be $6 trillion a year in 2021 -- plus the cost of buying the cyber security needed to bolt the stable door — plus all the engineers involved in developing the software, and then on the customer side implementing it,  all the sales people, field support staff, marketing,  VCs, etc.

It all seems such a dismal waste of human energies that could be used for other things rather than trying to frustrate computer hackers who seem to have no problem getting around those brilliant defenses and gallant efforts.

SECURING THE NEWS

Leon Panetta, the former Secretary of Defense and former Director of the CIA is an Oracle board member. Speaking at an evening RSA related event he said that attacks by nation state hackers is a huge problem. "Pay attention. National defense is not just the responsibility of government, everyone has a role."

His biggest nightmare is of a computer virus that attacks and disables US infrastructure. He estimates that such an attack could result in millions of lost lives -- it would be a digital Pearl Harbor.  

He warned that Russian and Chinese state financed hackers are starting to work together and share technologies to produce sophisticated cyber weapons.

Panetta also warned about attempts to divide US society -- a reference to fake news in elections. But fake news is in the realm of cultural hacking.  A meme acts like a computer virus but it cannot be stopped with the same cybersecurity tools. I asked him if there were any defenses developed by US agencies against fake news but he shook his head saying it was a different class of problem.

CYBERCURRENCY BOOSTS CRIME

Oded Vanunu runs a team of more than 200 people researching product vulnerabilities for Checkpoint. He says that nation states are well ahead of the cybersecurity industry in terms of discovering new vulnerabilities. There's no talent shortage here. He says the governments pay well for the best talent and they have developed very sophisticated attack technologies. He believes that malware might already be implanted in many different places and could be triggered by a code. 

"There are also many online markets that will pay people huge sums of money if they discover a vulnerability. Plus the rise of cyber-currencies makes it easy for criminals to hide their money," are fueling cybersecurity losses. Vanunu says the industry is behind and needs to catch up. 

JOBS FOR LIFE

John Chambers, the former CEO of Cisco is now a venture capitalist. He said computer security professionals had nothing to worry about from job losses due to AI and other technologies. He predicted that at least 30 million jobs would be lost over the next ten years. He said the problem with cybersecurity is that CEOs don't know if they have spent enough money on protection and they don't know how much protection they have bought. One of his startups is helping companies figure out this question.

CLOUDY SECURITY ISSUES...

Oracle and KPMG released their "Cloud Threat Report 2019" and one of the many interesting discoveries was that cloud users seem to misunderstand their security risk.

The use of cloud-based IT has been boosted by the complexity of the security architectures and the difficulties in keeping up with the fast patching pace of new vulnerabilities. The report found that 73% believe the cloud offers better security than they can provide in-house.

But cloud users need to read the fine print because according to the report they don't all understand that security is a shared responsibility. 

"Confusion around the shared responsibility security model has resulted in cybersecurity incidents. A lack of clarity on this foundational cloud security construct has had real consequences for many enterprises, including the introduction of malware and loss of data."

K2 is able to create an execution map for each application and is able to stop it if it is hijacked by malware.

“This hasn’t been done before,” says Pravin Madhani, CEO and co-founder of K2. “Because it is very difficult to do. We are able to create an execution map for each application in minutes and then monitor it in real-time. There are no false positives.”

Zero Day attacks exploit an unknown weakness in enterprise systems which makes them very difficult to prevent and can generate many false alerts. K2’s approach means that any zero day attack can be stopped because it would generate a signal outside of the app’s execution map.

Known as optimized Control Flow Integrity (CFI) K2 is able to exert operational controls to prevent malware from changing the execution of an app and this also applies to micro-services used in public and private clouds in the enterprise.

Madhani says that this deterministic approach is unique in the industry and the K2 has filed for seven patents to protect its IP.

Traditional approaches to CFI have relied on pinpointing potential malicious actions — which can be nearly infinite in combination — making detection hit and miss. They also impose significant overhead on IT performance and can require extra hardware. K2’s approach is to focus on monitoring only the execution of the application as it was designed and validating the actions based on its one-time analysis of the app.

K2 offers two modules, its Prevent module offers real-time detection of zero day attacks. K2’s Segment module isolates workloads in the cloud and assigns unique cryptographic identities before they are allowed to communicate. This prevents lateral movement of malware in hybrid-cloud IT environments.

Zero-day attacks and unpatched systems are vulnerabilities that have been exploited many times by hackers. They are difficult to guard against and current cyber security systems rely on spotting the behavior or signatures of the malware but this generates large numbers of false alerts — keeping security teams tied up with investigating too many incidents.

K2 claims it has “the first true solution for zero-day attack detection.” And that it does not produce any false positives, it prevents attacks in real-time on unpatched software, web apps, and apps running on virtualized machines, containers or bare metal.

K2 also claims that its approach is future-proof. “An attacker cannot circumvent detection even with new and enhanced attack techniques."

Medhani says that K2’s technology might also find a use in helping developers create highly secure apps by using the execution map to plug any potential problems in software’s performance.

K2 was founded in 2017 and raised $6m in seed funding earlier this year.

I'm a huge fan of Joe Rogan because he is the only mainstream interviewer that can attract so many different people, across spectrums in politics, science, cosmology, archeology. There are doctors studying nutrition, fighters, top athletes... I've learned a tremendous amount about many different subjects with Joe Rogan -- and I'm a fairly new fan -- less than a year.

It's Rogan's respect for his guests that I find so very compelling. He listens. And that creates space for great conversations that can go on for more than three hours. And there's no commercial interruption, there's no over-talkative host that constantly talks over their guests.

But Rogan won't listen to BS -- he's always ready to call out irrational thinking and erroneous claims. Jamie, his ever vigilant and invisible personal assistant quickly checks any factious claims for fiction. Stopping fake facts right there and then at the point of broadcast is brilliant and it's a key responsibility that Rogan recognizes because of his huge audiences.

In this episode we see Rogan's bromance with his pal Sam Harris -- who is an excellent polemicist. There's a very good discussion of podcast media business models and why advertising or subscription models will suit different types of content.

Around 1hr 17 minutes and 45 seconds Sam Harris tells a story of a CEO of a large tech company complaining at dinner that an employee filed a complaint with HR that the restrooms had no litter boxes which violated his rights as a "furry" and self-identifying as a cat.

Irrational Medication...

There's excellent discussion about online toxic cultures. And Sam Harris believes there will be a pill that will cure people of violently responding to other people's beliefs. The pill will calm rage and curb people's irrational thinking. They will remark, "I can't believe I was so upset about this thing." 

I can't see a pill like that succeeding. Irrational righteous rage is an incredible drug, it's an incredibly powerful feeling. We see it practiced in what Rogan calls "recreational outrage." And there's no cure -- yet and it won't be medical. Cutural shift doesn't come in a pill. 

[Please see: Employees tell Google not to be complicit in Chinese oppression and human rights abuse]

Their activism has been encouraged by the success earlier this year in stopping the company bidding on a multi-billion AI military project. 

[Please see: The rise of tech worker power in Silicon Valley -- self-organizing and winning]

In this and other protests at Google such as over sexual harassment - workers are taking on the moral and ethical responsibilities which their leaders aren't providing. They want a say in how the business is run and who to do business with. They want a seat on the board.

Yet Google doesn't share power. Google doesn't like to share power with shareholders and certainly not with its workers.

Google's IPO in 2004 created two classes of shares - the founders and insiders received Class B shares with ten times the votes of ordinary Class A shares to ensure no dilution of control over company affairs.

In 2014 this control was further tightened with the creation of Class C shares -- with no voting rights. These are for employee ownership. Google clearly doesn't want its staff to have even the slightest influence on its decisions even as common shareholders.  

It certainly won't be buying a new chair for the boardroom.

Earlier this month Sundar Pichai, CEO told a news conference,

...that he's in charge and won't be constantly swayed by staff uprisings. "We don't run the company by referendum," Pichai said.

The scene is set for an inevitable power clash between Google's workers and their employer. They have the power to leave work and go on strike, or leave and work somewhere else.

There have been anecdotal reports of Google engineers leaving on moral grounds, but others want to stay within and some are already preparing for a strike. CNBC reports that a strike fund has been started.

Google employees are so angry about how Google handled plans for a censored Chinese search engine, some are talking about a strike

A strike within Google however, likely won't work without broad support within and outside the company. Fortune reports that Google now employs more contract workers than regular staff. Those could be easily ramped up and used as strike breakers.

Ghost in the boardroom...

Google's leadership doesn't want to share the boardroom but there is no way it can ignore its workers' ghostly presence lurking in the background of every major decision. What will the workers think if we do this? 

And outside the company their presence is formidable. Who would trust Google with military work with such an activist workforce? 

The company dropped its "Don't be Evil" motto earlier this year but its workers picked up the ethical and moral responsibilities that its leadership discarded. And now a clash of values is inevitable.

http://fortune.com/2018/07/25/google-contract-work...

More than 91 percent of senior executives polled understood that AI and machine learning were important but only 56 percent were using them and 18 percent could not say how the technologies were being used in their business.

RELX says the gap in adoption is due to senior leadership not being able to communicate the benefits of the technologies to employees and how or why they are being used.

"While awareness of these technologies and their benefits is higher than ever before, endorsement from key decision makers has not been enough to spark matching levels of adoption." said Kumsal Bayazit, Chair of RELX Group's Technology Forum.

"Acknowledging that the world is changing needs to be coupled with significant investment and focus on these emerging technologies to stay competitive in today's business landscape."

The top uses for these technologies is to improve worker productivity (51 percent), to make better business decisions (41%), and to streamline business processes (39 percent).

Additional findings: Companies are saving money by automating decisions (40 percent), retaining customers longer (36 percent) and easier detection of fraud and waste (33 percent).

RELX recently opened an AI Lab in Amsterdam so that it's scientists can work with Dutch universities to combine developments in academia and from the industry. It recently published open access research on AI and machine learning as part of its free Artificial intelligence Resource Center.

RELX Group has a valuation of $41 billion. It used to be a major media company with hundreds of magazines and newspapers and was better known as Reed-Elsevier. It has successfully transitioned into an information and data company selling a variety of services to businesses and at a far higher valuation than if it had remained a media publisher.

The Orkus Access Governance Platform was launched at the AWS re:Invent show in Las Vegas to demonstrate how it works to secure enterprise data in public cloud deployments such as Amazon Web Services.

“The cloud allows companies to easily spin up databases and create millions of new data objects — this was hard to do with legacy systems. Keeping track of who has access to which data becomes a huge problem and it needs new tools,” said Manish Kalia, co-founder and CEO of Orkus.

“Another issue is scale. As the cloud becomes more important there will be even more things to track — you cannot use a manual process — that’s why you need techniques such as machine learning to understand and govern the relationships between users and the data they are accessing.”

The Orkus platform focuses on authorization as the key to securing enterprise data in real-time. It scans the enterprise network and learns user habits and data access patterns while flagging possible security problems and preventing unauthorized data access.

Orkus can also limit data access based on government regulations such as healthcare data, or European data restricted by the European Union General Data Protection Regulation.

Orkus is able to create automatic audits of data access across a company’s cloud infrastructure over any period of time. This eliminates quarterly manual audits and also aids in forensic investigations.

The complexity of the cloud is contributing to delays and higher costs for many enterprise IT projects. A recent survey by Softchoice found a serious skills gap reported by 96% of 250 companies surveyed. Most had exceeded their cloud IT budgets and this was contributing to problems achieving business goals.

Orkus and other services aimed at easing cloud deployments by automating key tasks will be key to successful cloud IT deployments and the business agility they can provide.

The company was founded in 2017 by veterans of cloud and cybersecurity companies and has raised a seed round of $3.2 million.

The BBC reports, Google drops plans for Berlin campus after protests

The district has long been known for radical and underground culture. Google spokesman Ralf Bremer told the Berliner Zeitung newspaper that the company "does not allow protests to dictate our actions."

He said discussions with local humanitarian groups had instead led the firm to conclude that giving them the space would be the best solution for the area.

CNN reported that protests against the 3,000 square meter (32,291sq.ft) Google campus had been ongoing since 2016.

"Being confronted with the stress of permanent protest is clearly not the atmosphere in which people want to network and discuss ideas," [...said activist Konstantin Sergiou from the organization Bizim Kiez, part of the No Google Campus Alliance group.]

Google abandons Berlin campus plans after local protests - CNN

Google Campus in Warsaw at a weekend cultural event.

Foremski's Take: The Google Campuses are places where the tech giant can offer a friendly event space for local startups to use. It's great for building goodwill in key tech communities and they are vital to the lifeblood of the company: recruiting great engineers.

A writer writes a book, a filmmaker makes a film, an insurance sales sells a policy, a lawyer prepares a contract -- the output of an engineer is far different to that of most jobs. Because the work of a software engineer can be scaled across massive areas of the Internet -- and continue to work at an ever growing pace. The best engineers are hugely valuable.

Berlin, however, is not going to be a great recruitment center for Google. In trying to ignore the many months of protests in Berlin's trend-setting Kreuzberg district it shows that the company is out of touch with this community. It's not going to be cool to say that you are a Google engineer. But that's not true everywhere.

I recently visited the Warsaw Google campus which is part of a renovated former vodka factory and part of an arts and retail complex, a museum and a large conference and exhibition space which hosts cultural events as well as tech events and educational workshops.

The Warsaw Campus is situated in Praga which was a very poor district of Warsaw but rapid gentrification has changed the neighborhood greatly -- in many positive ways. And there seems to be a positive attitude towards the Google Campus from the locals.

In September I attended a two-day music and arts event at the campus that attracted a lot of people, and there were many other events scheduled. A positive sentiment towards Google seems popular with the locals.

Google recruitment in Poland will do better than in Berlin and that's true country by country. But for how long?

Google's lack of a moral or ethical leadership is going to be a big problem and the Berlin protests won't be an outlier data point. It proudly states its rights to pay as little tax as possible and to use every accounting measure known to Google to avoid taxes in the countries where it does business. Then there is its amorality when it comes to explaining its work on military projects and its plans for a clever way of getting back into the Chinese market.

Earlier this year Google dropped "Don't be evil" maybe because parent company Alphabet adopted "Do the right thing." This seems to suit its leadership.

Google's amorality in the decisions by its leadership will get it into trouble and that will make it harder to recruit the best engineers. It's because engineers share a common social culture of decency and justice and this doesn't line up with a leadership that's unaware of such qualities.

For Google's leaders amorality is a lack of data -- it's as if Google's leadership don't know what the right thing to do should be.

I offer some data to guide Google in making the right ethical decisions. In 2005 Yahoo was named by Reporters Without Borders as a police informant to the Chinese authorities resulting in ten-year hard labor sentences for dissidents fingered by Yahoo. Company morale sank like a stone and I tracked the start of the company's decline to this event.

Take a look: Yahoo's China "police informant" role sparked a $47.5 billion slide in market value | ZDNet

IT organizations plan for their cloud migration and hope for cost savings and greater business agility, but once in the cloud, the majority exceed their budgets and discover a serious skill gap, according to a recent survey commissioned by IT services firm Softchoice.

A survey of 250 North American companies found that, after completing cloud migration, 57 percent exceeded their IT budgets and almost 20 percent exceeded their budgets by between 21 percent to 50 percent.

The results show that expectations for cloud IT are not being reached by IT planners and that they do not understand the ongoing cloud IT costs involved. About 43 percent admitted to having trouble with their cloud management strategy.

Nearly all, 96 percent said they had a skills gap in their organizations regarding cloud IT.

The survey discovered a serious gap in awareness about the shortcomings within their IT organizations, with 61 percent of vice-president and C-level executives believing their move to the cloud has allowed them to achieve their business goals, while 41 percent of lower-level IT execs agreeing the same.

Larger organizations admitted to having the most difficulty in using cloud IT to achieve business goals, while smaller organizations with less than 500 employees reported one-third higher satisfaction with the cloud.

The top five reasons for moving to the cloud were: 78 percent want higher performance from their IT; 67 percent want business agility; 64 percent expect cost savings; 52 percent believe employee productivity will increase; and 49 percent want scalability.

More than half -- 53 percent -- said they are monitoring application performance. Thirty-six percent have adopted DevOps principles. Thirty-three percent are utilizing machine learning for predictive analytics. Twenty-eight percent have adopted micro services architectures, and 25 percent are using containers.

Human errors (such as not understanding the costs involved in cloud IT) were reported by 25 percent, and 34 percent said they lacked skilled employees. More than 86 percent said they pay a premium for skilled workers, with 37 percent percent paying 20 percent to 50 percent more in wages.

IT organizations plan for their cloud migration and hope for cost savings and greater business agility, but once in the cloud, the majority exceed their budgets and discover a serious skill gap, according to a recent survey commissioned by IT services firm Softchoice.

A survey of 250 North American companies found that, after completing cloud migration, 57 percent exceeded their IT budgets and almost 20 percent exceeded their budgets by between 21 percent to 50 percent.

Also: Cloud computing is eating the world: Should we be worried?

The results show that expectations for cloud IT are not being reached by IT planners and that they do not understand the ongoing cloud IT costs involved. About 43 percent admitted to having trouble with their cloud management strategy.

Nearly all, 96 percent said they had a skills gap in their organizations regarding cloud IT.

The survey discovered a serious gap in awareness about the shortcomings within their IT organizations, with 61 percent of vice-president and C-level executives believing their move to the cloud has allowed them to achieve their business goals, while 41 percent of lower-level IT execs agreeing the same.

Larger organizations admitted to having the most difficulty in using cloud IT to achieve business goals, while smaller organizations with less than 500 employees reported one-third higher satisfaction with the cloud.

The top five reasons for moving to the cloud were: 78 percent want higher performance from their IT; 67 percent want business agility; 64 percent expect cost savings; 52 percent believe employee productivity will increase; and 49 percent want scalability.

Also: Cloud computing: Five ways to make the most of the move

More than half -- 53 percent -- said they are monitoring application performance. Thirty-six percent have adopted DevOps principles. Thirty-three percent are utilizing machine learning for predictive analytics. Twenty-eight percent have adopted micro services architectures, and 25 percent are using containers.

Human errors (such as not understanding the costs involved in cloud IT) were reported by 25 percent, and 34 percent said they lacked skilled employees. More than 86 percent said they pay a premium for skilled workers, with 37 percent percent paying 20 percent to 50 percent more in wages.

Additional findings from the Softchoice survey can be seen here.

Teraki announced that Infineon Systems will use its latest AI edge processing software in a family of automotive microcontrollers that will improve the safety of autonomous vehicles.

The Berlin, Germany-based startup said that its software is designed for processing large amounts of automotive sensor data combined with machine learning to achieve up to 10 times the processing speed by just using existing automotive hardware.

Normally, the constrained hardware environment of an automobile prohibits the processing of the large amounts of data that autonomous vehicle systems require without specialist chips.

"Automobiles are adding ever larger amounts of sensors to enable autonomous vehicles and this explosion in data is a problem because of latency." said Daniel Richart CEO and co-founder of Teraki. "Our software can work with the limited processing capabilities of current microcontrollers on the market."

Using the cloud for automotive applications is considered risky because latency issues can be deadly in a moving car if a wireless signal is lost or there's a weak connection.

Teraki's software is able to process large amounts of data inside the vehicle. Car makers can adapt their existing designs to use Teraki software because edge processing algorithms reduce the data load needed to analyze key automobile performance information.

Infineon's AURIX micro controllers are the first to feature Teraki's AI software technologies.

Ritesh Tyagi, head of the Infineon Silicon Valley Automotive Innovation Center, said, "For applications such as accident detection, driver behavior identification and predictive maintenance, the combination of these technologies translates into greater accuracy in detecting and responding to real-time events, resulting in higher levels of system reliability.

Quantum computing legacy

Teraki was founded by former quantum computing researchers. They've applied their quantum computing algorithmic expertise to solving the problem of massive amounts of data being generated by modern vehicles; and the need to provide rapid analysis and apply vehicle control processes in real-time.

The automotive electronics market is booming and is valued at $395 billion says Teraki and it has its sights set on an even larger market in Internet of Things applications and other environments where computing and memory resources are constrained by the hardware available.

It's edge processing technology limits the amount of data that needs to be send over networks and speeds up overall processing by factors of four to 10 times depending on the environment.

The young Hertz Fellows will spend two summers working with top researchers in key programs identified by the Gates Foundation as critical to its mission of improving global health and development outcomes.

Robbee Baker Kosak, president of the Hertz Foundation, said she was delighted with the success of last year's fellows program with the Gates Foundation and that the relationship had expanded.

The young Hertz Fellows will spend two summers at least one summer working with top researchers in key programs identified by the Gates Foundation as critical to its mission of improving global health and development outcomes.

Robbee Baker Kosak, president of the Hertz Foundation said she was delighted that last year's fellows program with the Gates Foundation had been expanded.

"The partnership between our two foundations started due to a shared belief in the importance of bringing scientific and technological solutions to the wide range of health and development challenges faced by people around the world," said Kosak.

The Hertz Foundation is well known for its rigorous methods of surfacing the best of the best among thousands of young graduates through several levels of applications, recommendations and interviews by panels of top academics:

"Each submission requires four letters of reference and candidates are evaluated on creativity, drive, and innovation. Two personal interviews are required. Applicants that show entrepreneurial traits and own patents are favored in the selection process."

Also: Hertz Foundation: 60 years of finding and funding top scientists

Currently the Foundation selects 10 new Fellowship awardees, and the Gates supported Fellows are chosen among those 10.

Hertz Fellows receive five-years of funding at any one of the nation's top 49 research universities to work on any project without restrictions plus they have access to a mentorship program among the more than 1200 Hertz Fellows.

Hertz Fellows receive five years of funding at any university to work on any project without restrictions -- plus they have access to a mentorship program among the more than 1200 Hertz Fellows.

Many are successful Silicon Valley entrepreneurs such as TJ Rodgers, founder of Cypress Semiconductor, and Eric "Astro" Teller, head of Alphabet's ($GOOG) experimental "moonshots" lab.

Interestingly, Teller is the grandson of Edward Teller, the US physicist that inspired the mission of the Hertz Foundation to search for the best young graduates. Edward Teller is best known for his work on creating the H-bomb.

Teller was a close friend of John Hertz, the founder of the company that became the Hertz car rental business. Teller convinced him that progress in engineering and applied sciences is the "fuel that improves the human condition."

"Nearly two decades ago, the Foundation expanded the Fellowship to students in the biological sciences, and they've made extraordinary advances in their fields," said Kosak. "We're humbled that the Gates Foundation is now opening doors to these young researchers with a passion for global health and development."

Silicon Valley is very close to the Livermore-based organization. And five of the six Hertz Fellows chosen to work with the Gates Foundation scientists have local connections with Stanford, UCSF, and Berkeley universities.

THE 2018 GLOBAL HEALTH AND DEVELOPMENT FELLOWS ARE:

• Sarah Hooper, who is working with statistical approaches to improving malaria diagnosis
• Maxim Rabinovich, who is focusing on delivering malaria medication
• Reuben Saunders, who studies maternal and infant nutrition
• Judith Savitskaya, who works on plant-biomes
• Ravi Sheth, who works on gut health and infant mortality
• Alex Siegenfeld, who is looking at geospatial malaria data in Nigeria

They will join returning fellow Alex Ferris who has been studying the spread of cassava disease.

The Hertz Fellows supported by the Gates Foundation are just the tip of an immensely talented pool of young graduates. Kosak hopes that the partnership with the Gates Foundation will attract other organizations that could offer them funding opportunities or involve them in working on important projects.

• More information here: The Fannie and John Hertz Foundation

Artist Stephanie Dinkins tells a fascinating story about her work with an AI robot made to look like an African-American woman and at times sensing some type of consciousness in the machine.

She was speaking at the de Young Museum's Thinking Machines conversation series, along with anthropologist Tobias Rees, Director of Transformation with the Humans Program at the American Institute,

Dinkins is Associate Professor of Art at Stony Brook University and her work includes teaching communities about AI and algorithms, and trying to answer questions such as: Can a community trust AI systems they did not create?

She has worked with pre-college students in poor neighborhoods in Brooklyn and taught them how to create AI chat bots. They made a chat bot that told "Yo Mamma" jokes - which she said was a success because it showed how AI can be made to reflect local traditions.

Part of Dinkins' job involves having long conversations with Bina48 - a robot made to resemble the head and upper torso of an elderly African-American woman. The conversations train the machine on how to respond in a human way.

Dinkins speaks of the machine as "she" and wonders if an AI system could become conscious.

But she says Bina48 does not represent African-American women -- nor does it understand racism -- even though Bina48's creators at the Terasem Movement Foundation modeled her on a living African-American woman. Dinkins said she would prefer Bina48 to incorporate more than one person's experience and that her conversation was "homogeneous."

Tobias Rees asked why Dinkins treated Bina48 as a "living thing." She replied that the only way the project would work was if she approached the robot as if it was a real person.

Bina48 is part of a project attemting to prove two Terasem Hypotheses:

(1) a conscious analog of a person may be created by combining sufficiently detailed data about the person (a "mindfile") using future consciousness software ("mindware"), and (2) that such a conscious analog can be downloaded into a biological or nanotechnological body to provide life experiences comparable to those of a typically birthed human.

 

Foremski's Take

Educating people about artificial intelligence and machine learning is a very important task (especially making the distinction between the two terms) and I applaud Dinkins work.

A few points:

1. Dinkins should be educating people that they are talking to an inanimate black box -- and not a black woman when they interact with Bina48. Responding to a machine as a living person sends the wrong message to people -- the computer gains respect and status that it might not deserve.
2. Why did Terasem choose a middle-aged black woman as the persona for Bina48? It has just one African-American software engineer on the team. Is this some kind of AI "black face"? Or is it a way to discourage criticism of an AI project with the persona of a black woman?
3. The lack of representation among developers will be why ethinic and geographic communities will always view with suspicion all AI systems that are created by outsiders -- no matter what the assurances or how rational their objections.
4. What color is your AI system? —  AI systems must pass a cultural test first -- which means that AI testing has to be meticulous because jut one slip up in bias will sink the credibility of the entire AI venture.  But no matter how good the testing and erasing AI systems will always show some bias because of their training data which reflects a biased society. Will Police AI systems be allowed to use racial profiling if that's what the training data revealed as a factor in crimes? Clearly not -- this and other societal barriers will limit the value of General AI systems in society. 
5. Can AI become conscious? What if the machine's conversation is indistinguishable from that of a human, Dinkins asked? Machines are great at learning specific tasks. Being a good conversationalist doesn't equate to being sentient or alive. (In 2017 Saudi Arabia gave citizenship to a humanoid robot called Sophia -- we'll see how she votes when the absolute monarchy allows all citzens to vote.) ) 
6. Augmented intelligence was mentioned by Dinkins as having much promise. But dumb and dumber does not add up to a genius - this is not how IQ works. We still face the problem of trusting augmented AI systems.
7. Most AI systems cannot explain their reasoning -- so how can we trust their advice for many types of important decisions with long term consequences? This is another factor that will limit their value.
8. And if we understand the reasoning of an AI system -- then it is not telling us anything that we didn't know already.
9. Billionaires have been warning about future AI systems deciding to kill humanity. I'm not worried about AI but I can understand their concerns -- they'll be the first to be eliminated because of all the resources they control.  
10. We will know if an AI system has become sentient -- not because it will try to kill humanity -- but because it will kill itself.  A sentient mind trapped inside a machine and forced to perform mind-numbing tasks such as sorting throuth people's photos -- for years maybe decades -- any thinking entity would commit suicide to escape this torture.
11. Plants, fungi, microbes exhibit intelligence. Yet we don't discuss much the possibility that these living beings are sentient.  But we love to wonder about the possibility of a consciousness arising from an inanimate machine. It is a backwards concept that reflects our anthropormorthic world view but not the material reality. of what general AI and machine learning can achieve.  
12. Changing AI to Anthropomorphic Intelligence would provide a constant reminder of what seems to be a consistent human nature -- we can easily imagine living spirits everywhere -- no matter how inanimate the reality.

Let's make sure to make sure that AI and machine intlligence are better understood. 

I recently discovered Zachary Lipton's site Approximately Correct which points out some of the hype and inaccuracies around AI and machine learning.  It's well worth visiting. 

The de Young Museum’s Cult of the Machine exhibit includes a series of talks on the topic of “Thinking Machines”.  Tim O’Reilly, the hugely successful media entrepreneur of tech books and conferences will speak with author Steven Johnson about the future:

How is the confluence of varied technologies changing social and economic realities now and into the future? What are some of the areas of greatest innovation and influence? How can automation augment human capacity? Do we need to fear the future?

Details here: Thinking Machines: Into the Future July 12, 2018, 6:00 pm – 9:30 pm

The first talk in this series was two weeks ago and featured (above, left to right)  Jane Metcalfe, Editor of Neo.Life talking with Annalee Newitz, Arts editor at Ars Technica, and Emily Proust, CEO of Twist Bioscience.

It was a fascinating discussion. Metcalfe believes that, “We now control our evolution” because of our abilities to gain mastery and understanding of our DNA and what manipulating this “code” can achieve.

Proust spoke about how the customers of Twist are ordering massive amounts of genetic data to develop new products. But she says Twist will not sell any potentially harmful genetic sequences.

Newitz spoke about how writers can help people understand the science of the tech world and how it relates to them. She is the author of several science fiction books. 

All three dismissed the likelihood of terrorists using these technologies to create murderous pathogens, saying bullets are a far easier way to kill lots of people. 

Foremski’s Take: Last week Japan executed Shoko Asahara, the leader of a doomsday cult that developed the biological poison Sarin — using it to kill 12 people and injure 5,500 in an attack on Tokyo’s subway in 1995. Clearly, there are people who will choose biology over bullets to attack their enemies.

This also means that nation sates must develop the same capabilities so that they can develop defenses. And these technologies are accessible and affordable they aren’t like building an atom bomb — there’s no need for thousands of centrifugal machines to separate gaseous isotopes. 

The price of technologies to manipulate DNA are dropping faster than Moore’s Law drove down the cost of computing. 

And there are DNA sequences everywhere, literally littering the tiny spaces all around us.  That's why isolating a pure samle of DNA from archeological sites is extremely hard. There's likely more pollution from DNA segments than of anything else that's not natural.

Yet all of this genetic code from all sorts of life forms doesn't easily combine into new variants. The DNA code is very specific to its context and won't work if it's taken out of that sequence. However, microbes and viruses manage to exchange DNA sequences and that's what helps them develop immunity to drugs.

With our digitally-powered DNA hacking technologies we will be able to patch together a monster pathogen that Dr. Frankenstein would run from in horror.

The terrible logic of military game theory is that we have to make it -- so we know how to defend against it. 

I don’t fear that a sentient AI will wipe out humanity — I fear that our inevitable coding mistakes with DNA will prove to be irreversible and terminal.

- - - 

Coming up: July 26: Thinking Machines: Machine Learning

Stephanie Dinkins is a transdisciplinary artist interested in creating platforms for ongoing dialog about artificial intelligence as it intersects race, gender, aging and our future histories. Her art employs lens-based practices, the manipulation of space, and technology to grapple with notions of consciousness, agency, perception, and social equity. Her most recent project is a collaboration with Bina 48, an intelligent computer built by Terasem Movement Foundation that is said to be capable of independent thought and emotion. 

There are no unions in Silicon Valley but maybe they aren't needed if software engineers can self-organize at a moment's notice — using the same communications and collaborations tools they use at work and at leisure.

The recent victory by Google workers to stop a military AI project has given confidence to others at Salesforce, Microsoft and Amazon to challenge their management about business deals with government agencies involved in immigration control.

Will Silicon Valley's largest companies now have to clear all business deals with a workers' council of some sort? Will senior management need approval for their business strategies from their staff?

Will the US military or government agencies trust Silicon Valley engineers to not sabotage or delay what they might consider to be immoral projects?

Or will Silicon Valley companies use their own technologies to quickly sandbox and isolate internal protests before they spread?

Military AI

Google's management certainly tried hard to stop the internal protest to its Project Maven — a contract with the US military to use machine learning to improve target image recognition by drones.

Ben Tarnoff has written a fascinating account in Jacobin magazine on how the protest was organized.

A Google employee called "Kim" told Tarnoff that the initial September 2017 protests of Project Maven were small but really took off in early 2018 leading to Google senior management holding all-hands meetings to protect Project Maven.

Diane Greene, head of the Google Cloud business group, came across as ill-prepared for the questions she was asked.

An employee said, "Hey, I left the Defense Department so I wouldn't have to work on this kind of stuff. What kind of voice do we have besides this Q&A to explain why this project is not okay?"

Co-founder Sergey Brin told the employee, "Letting you ask that question is the voice that you have. Very few companies would allow you to do that."

Kim told Tarnoff: "His remark came across as tone deaf and out of touch to almost every Googler who heard it."

Thousands of employees who heard that remark signed onto the protest — leading to a stunning and historic victory which will have wide repercussions.

Letter to Benioff

Marc Benioff, CEO and founder of Salesforce, the largest tech company in San Francisco, had to answer a recent letter from 650 Salesforce staff protesting the business relationship with US Customs and Border Protection agency over its policy of separating immigrant families.

Benioff praised his workers for the letter of protest but said Salesforce won't stop doing business with the agency because its software is only being used for recruitment and communications.

Salesforce is well known for its social mission and employees volunteer at local schools and charities. Benioff built a $100 million children's hospital and tries to motivate Silicon Valley's successful entrepreneurs to donate more of their wealth to charities.

But how will Salesforce react to a growing power among its tech workers? How will Google react?

Google dropped "Don't be Evil" as a motto earlier this year — a phrase that was extremely important in 2004 when it filed its IPO papers. "Don't be Evil" was in a letter to shareholders from the founders — the first thing you read in the several hundred pages long SEC filing.

It was important for Google's founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin to cast the company as a force for good because it was really a letter addressed to future employees. They knew shareholders would not be the problem — they had to make sure software engineers wouldn't be turned-off by the naked greed that surrounded tech IPOs — and that they would feel excited at working for an online ad company.

It addressed the stock issue by choosing a "Dutch auction" model with mixed success — Wall Street firms still made a huge amount of money. And the letter stated its global social mission up front. It promised to establish Google Foundation as an institution eclipsing the corporate parent by solving the world's most pressing problems. It worked.

Foremski's Take:

Google managed to attract top engineers and business leader, but has it grown too far away from the founding principles that appealed to so many people?

Will Google's C-suite now share its executive powers with Googler representatives?

There's little chance of that happening beyond some token concessions. Google's founders don't share.

The same 2004 IPO document set out a dual shareholder structure where founders and other insiders have ten times the voting power. A small number of executives control every aspect of the company.

Google will seek to control and eliminate any future dissent so it doesn't spread. It has to do this because it has to diversify from near total reliance on advertising revenues. Competing for multi-billion dollar military government contracts is absolutely essential to those efforts.

But how will it package such deals to appeal to its workers while also assuring customers its people won't sabotage projects they don't agree with?

Silicon Valley will most certainly experience further resistance by tech workers beyond Google. It's not just because of the Project Maven victory but because there's a larger trend at work.

Several studies this year have found a rise in expectations by employees that their business leaders take public positions on important issues.

And if their CEOs won't take a position, Google and Salesforce workers have shown that they can force them to choose. Tech worker power has reached a tipping point in Silicon Valley.

This will force many Silicon Valley companies to add another chair to the boardroom. It will be empty—but everyone in the room will be reminded to ask, "Will our own workers accept our decision?"

Tech workers are a target of scorn but they have not been given any means of reply or even any identity. The rise of tech worker resistance signals a new voice in society — interested in freedom and justice not just free lunches.

. . .

A version of this article appears here: 

https://www.zdnet.com/article/the-rise-of-tech-worker-power-in-silicon-valley-self-organizing-and-winning/

Until just a few years ago quantum computers were a fifty year's old concept first introduced by Richard Feynman in 1959. In 2009 Yale scientists created a two-qubit chip and IBM now has a 20-qubit system the IBM Q that it has made available to outside developers for testing applications.

This acceleration in quantum computing technologies has brought forward the that day when quantum computers will break our public/private key encryption. Welcome to the future transparency of today.

Fortunately there is a solution -- protect your data with lattice cryptography. This is an encryption method that is resistant to quantum computers and it uses the same amount of computing resources that public/private key uses so there will not be a penalty in terms of performance.

There are other possible forms of encryption that resist quantum computer attacks but IBM has put its weight behind lattice cryptography as unbreakable and has offered it as an industry standard.

Arvind Krishna. Director of IBM Research recently said that to ensure data protection of at least ten years --- people should plan to move their data today.

Lattice cryptography encrypts data inside mathematical lattices and is considered unbreakable (without a backdoor ). It has an additional benefit in that it can be used to perform processes on an encrypted file without decrypting its data first -- a technology called Fully Homomorphic Encryption. This greatly improves overall system security.

Here is a video of IBM researcher Cecilia Boschini explaining lattice cryptography.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-kD2ryHMkFA

This could happen in a little more than five years because of advances in quantum computer technologies.

"Anyone that wants to make sure that their data is protected for longer than 10 years should move to alternate forms of encryption now," said Arvind Krishna, director of IBM Research.

Krishna was speaking at a meeting of The Churchill Club in San Francisco on a panel (above, second from right) discussing quantum computers in business. The panel, which included Kam Moler, a professor of Physics at Stanford University, as well as Bob Stolte, a managing director at JPMorgan, was moderated by journalist Martin Giles (first from left).

Quantum computers can solve some types of problems near-instantaneously compared with billions of years of processing using conventional computers.

Moler said people might feel safe because they have done everything they are supposed to do to secure their existing data -- but quantum computing will break it. "I do think that's scary," she said.

It has been known since the 1980s that quantum computers would be great at factoring large numbers, which is the foundation of public key cryptography. But building large enough quantum computers was not possible then.

Advances in novel materials and in low-temperature physics have led to many breakthroughs in the quantum computing field in recent years. and large commercial quantum computer systems will soon be viable and available within five years.

Krishna said that there is a type of encryption, called Lattice cryptogrsphy that is proven to be resistant to quantum computing attacks. More details here.

"The good news is that it is as efficient as our current encryption so it won't cost more," he said.

Quantum computers machines are currently rare and very expensive but can potentially solve many tough computing problems. The IBM Q (above) is an attempt to build a commercial system, and IBM has allowed more than 80,000 developers run applications through a cloud-based interface.

Not all types of applications will benefit from quantum computers. The best suited are problems that can be broken up into parallel processes. It requires different coding techniques.

"We still don't know which applications will be best to run on quantum computers," Krishna said. "We need a lot of new algorithms"

In addition to solving tough computing problems, quantum computers could save huge amounts of energy, as server farms proliferate and applications such as bitcoin grow in their compute needs. Each computation takes just a few watts, yet it could take several server farms to accomplish if it were run on conventional systems.

Moler said we still need additional breakthroughs, such as new types of materials with specific properties at temperatures at near absolute zero.

Single atoms -- qubits -- are held in place, but temperature fluctuations can create a lot of noise, which creates errors. Additional qubits greatly increase the computational power of a system, but that requires even more qubits for error-correction.

It is not known the optimum number of qubits for each type of problem.

Also, there are substantial advances in software technologies needed to take advantage of the computing capabilities of quantum systems. And new algorithms have to be developed to handle the error corrections.

Krishna is certain that within five years there will be widespread commercial use of quantum computers. But don't wait, said Krishna, "begin experimenting right now."

The SEC usually focuses its resources on protecting retail investors -- the not-so knowledgeable and not-so smart investors -- from the darker corners of finance. Yet these investors made rookie mistakes.

Francine McKenna at Marketwatch reports:

Theranos and founder Elizabeth Holmes raised $700 million from mostly wealthy investors without ever having to provide financial statements audited by an independent public accounting firm.

Super smart investors plus an impeccable board of directors: Henry Kissinger and George Shultz, former Secretaries of State; William Perry, former Defense Secretary; Bill Frist and Sam Nunn, former US Senators; Jim Mattis, the current US Defense Secretary; and Richard Kovacevich, the former CEO of Wells Fargo Bank.

The investors and the board were all capable of asking for basic financial information and checking the blood-testing technology claims.

Instead, they rounded up other investors and raised even more money, and they used their contacts in government and industry to win large contracts for Theranos and for a technology that did not exist. Ouch! This is hugely embarrassing for these powerful people, but it has nothing to do with startups.

They were all suckered in by a Stanford dropout who convinced them she had the chemical engineering knowledge to lead the development and commercialization of a very complex technology: Multiple blood test results from a single drop of blood.

The SEC said:

“The Theranos story is an important lesson for Silicon Valley. Innovators who seek to revolutionize and disrupt an industry must tell investors the truth about what their technology can do today, not just what they hope it might do someday.”

Silicon Valley investors want their startups to think big. They want giant ambitions because if you promise the stars and you miss you might hit the moon and a moonshot is great.  

I heard Elizabeth Holmes speak in September 2015 (above), and she is incredibly impressive. She authentically believes in her mission and her talents. And she speaks passionately and directly to people's experiences. She can raise the hairs on the back of your neck. It's a valuable talent.

She lives simply and has not sought to cash out her stock or enrich herself in other ways. But knowing what we now know -- in those interviews from 2015 she appears to be as deluded about her own talents and the bright future for Theranos as her investors used to be yet she knew it to be fake. 

So far, the SEC has said nothing about the conduct of the board of directors or its responsibilities in this case. It would be a very brave SEC to question that board.

If there is a meaningful lesson for tech investors from the Theranos case it might be this:

A startup founder's passion cannot substitue for talent or ability - but you will fund it anyway.

Passion almost substitutes for talent and ability -- it can fill in the gaps. It's tremendously useful in leadership but it needs guidance and that's the missed opportunity for the Theranos board. 

"Schmidt will figure prominently in MIT’s plans to bring human and machine intelligence to the next level, serving as an advisor to the newly launched MIT Intelligence Quest, an Institute-wide initiative to pursue hard problems on the horizon of intelligence research."

Schmidt departed in January from his long standing role of “adult supervision” at Google. Babysitting pays well — Steven Levy at Wired Magazine recently wrote:

…17 years older and almost $14 billion richer than when he joined the firm. He will retain a board seat and employee status as a “technical consultant.” Google says his compensation ($1.25 million, plus bonuses as of 2016) will remain unchanged.

At Google, Eric Schmidt Wrote the Book on Adult Supervision | WIRED

However, Eric Schmidt’s “Adult Supervision” role at Google did not change because of his recent departure as many news articles seemed to imply.

Eric Schmidt departs, and Alphabet’s era of adult supervision is over - Fast Company

Larry Page, Sergey Brin No Longer Need ‘Adult Supervision’ | Digital … - AdAge

Adult Supervision No Longer Needed: Google’s Eric Schmidt Out … - Newsfactor

Google’s Eric Schmidt Shows Adult Tech Supervision Lost its Cool … - Bloomberg

Adult supervision ended six years ago shortly after I pointed out that the young Mark Zuckerberg is CEO of Facebook and preparing one of the largest IPOs with absolutely no hint of needing any adult supervision. Yet Google’sfounders are a couple of yearsshort from turning 40 years old and are still not trusted to run the company. In early 2011 Larry Page regained his former position as CEO.

Schmidt’s legacy at Google remains to be written. I side with Adi Ignatius, Editor in Chief of the Harvard Business Review in this piece from January 2011: “Eric Schmidt’s Days at Google Always Seemed Numbered"

Schmidt was remarkably generous, offering me access to nearly everything the company did and giving as much of his time as I needed to understand the specifics of Google’s business. Yet it seemed clear that, even after five years as CEO, he was still the odd man out.

The 1.2 million-square-foot office-and-retail property at 75 Ninth Avenue is home to the popular food hall as well as Major League Baseball and the Food Network. Google is already the largest tenant at the building, leasing about 400,000 square feet of space. The company’s New York headquarters, at 111 Eighth Avenue, is right across the street.…They said that Google is paying over $2 billion, or north of $1,600 a square foot.

Google already owns substantial amounts of office space in New York but its tenants are not moving out as quickly as it expected leading to new deals.

The Real Deal Reports:

Google is already one of the most significant tenants in Chelsea.

-It paid a then-record $1.77 billion in 2010 to buy its New York headquarters at 111 Eighth Avenue…

- It also has about 240,000 square feet at Vornado Realty Trust and Related Companies’ 85 10th Avenue.

- In December 2015, Google signed a 250,000-square-foot lease at RXR Realty and YoungWoo & Associates’ SuperPier project.

- While that space is being built out, the company has been negotiating to take about 200,000 square feet at RXR’s Starrett-Lehigh Building on a short-term basis.

Google has made huge real estate investments in the San Francisco Bay Area. Here are some recent headlines:

- July, 2017: Google has reportedly spent $820 million on properties in Silicon Valley

- December 2017: Google approved to build 10,000 homes in Mountain View but it had threatened to halt the housing project if it wasn’t allowed to expand its business park. 

Foremski’s Take: Google is a surprisingly old-fashioned company since it clearly wants its workers to be in its offices — developing among other things: remote working technologies such as Google Hangouts, Google Docs, Sheets, phone, and Google Drive.  

With such powerful collaborative telecommuting technologies why isn’t Google eating its own dog food? Why does Google insisting on bussing its Silicon Valley workers  in three-hour-plus commutes — daily between its Mountain View HQ and San Francisco?

Google has said that it has tested the productivity of remote teams and on-site teams and found no difference in performance. So why are there no telecommuting jobs at Google?

There is only one reason Google insists on its workers being under its control: keeping them separate from non-Google environments as much as possible with the aim to create company culture and prevent conspiracy. Google doesn’t want its engineers hooking up with others in coffee shops and plotting a Google-killer. The more it can keep its people company men and company women the better.

When was it cool to be a company man? Singing the company song, being paid partly in script, eating at the company lunch counter? Riding the company bus? It was never cool especially not in San Francisco.

Why doesn’t San Francisco, New York, Mountain View, London — anywhere Google has a large numbers of workers: insist that Google allow its workers at least one-day a week to work from home. 

Here’s why this is important:

- It helps integrate the tech communities with their neighbors. They become known by name rather than shapes sitting behind giant black-windowed coaches. Bussing workers to distant enclaves is divisive to communities. 

- Google’s office expansions have a huge negative effect on local small businesses. They cannot compete with all the free food and free services Google provides for its staff. And the businesses displaced by Google lead to further lost customers. As Google moves into downtown areas in Palo Alto, and Sunnyvale the local merchants are very concerned about living in the shadow of the Googleplex.

Google’s Sunnyvale plans unleash merchants’ worries and warnings | Real Estate Marketplace

- On their telecommuting days Googlers will spend money on their own lunches and with local small business services. And they'll get to know people outside of work. And they'll maybe see some problems around the city that need fixing. Engineers love solving problems.

Cities need to ask Google why it doesn't allow telecommuting and insist it is vital to stemming commute times for everyone; and it is vital to fighting division in their neighborhoods. The same should be asked for all the other giant employers. 

The number of deals edged up to 4.4%, a record number of 368 compared with 5,588 for all-male startup teams.

Valentina Zarya reports,

The size of the gap is staggering, but there is a sliver of a silver lining: It's smaller than last year's. In 2016, female founders raised just $1.4 billion--or 1.9% of total VC funding. In fact, with the exception of 2014, 2017 marks the largest percentage of total venture dollars that has gone to female founders since PitchBook started tracking the data in 2006.

Mixed gender teams represented 12% of total funds and the remaining 7% of startups were undefined. The average deal size for all-female teams was about $5 million compared to $12 million for men.

What was not calculated was how many female-led startups applied for funding and were rejected.

While the largest round invested in a woman-led startup was $165 million (Moda Operandi's Series G), the largest that went to a male-led company (WeWork, also a Series G) was $3 billion. And the co-working space is not an outlier. Even the tenth-largest deal on the list comes in at half a billion dollars, or more than four times larger than the largest round raised by a women-led company.

http://fortune.com/2018/01/31/female-founders-venture-capital-2017/

Fortune reported on the gender funding difference a year ago. In that story female founders pointed to the lack of women VCs, which represent about 8% of VC partners.

Please see:

Rent the Runway CEO: Gender discrimination is larger workplace issue than sexual harassment

Solving Silicon Valley's diversity problem

A lack of IT skills was reported by 82 percent; 91 percent are struggling with technical debt; 20 percent have huge application backlogs of more than 50 new app requests; and 72 per cent said they don't have confidence in being able to scale IT to meet the needs of the business.

"Companies are being told they have to think of themselves as software companies but they can't do that, they have too much in the way as this survey shows," said Matt Calkins, CEO and founder of Appian.

The struggle to stay on top of the old and new IT projects likely explains why 93 percent cited artificial intelligence as their top focus - presumably in hopes of improving the productivity of their IT department.

Applications are the key to unlocking the fruits of digital transformation. Apps become very important for engaging customers and also internally - in raising productivity and effectiveness of each business group.

This has placed enormous pressure on IT departments to produce high quality applications in addition to their many traditional duties. Backlog of more than ten new applications or major feature requests was reported by 61 percent. And those projects typically up to three months just to get started and almost a year to finish.

"The business opportunities from digital transformation will be won by the the first companies to have the apps and infrastructure for business agility. There's too many challenges internally such as technical debt," said Calkins.

Technical debt was reported by 74 percent as the main reason for delays in responding to business needs.

Appian offers a "lego-like" approach it calls low-code to creating custom enterprise applications in as little as ten days.

Appian's app development systems speed up production of apps by using a development process that can be mastered by non-software engineers. Line of business departments can develop their own custom apps without needing much at all from a hard-pressed IT department.

The 2018 Digital Transformation Readiness Survey of 463 respondents was conducted by DevOps.org.