Solve for X Talk

The conference was pretty interesting. Here's a link to the talk.

Start at 1:10:10.

Solve for X in Washington DC

I've been invited by Google and USAID to speak at the Global Diaspora Forum in Washington next week. If you are going and would like to check it out, I'll see you there!

Register for the next Solve for X, at the Global Diaspora Forum in DC, May 13: goo.gl/ROSmr See you there!

— A Googler (@google) May 9, 2013

Aaron Fyke MIT talk part of Google X - Solve For X Series

I am privileged to be in some pretty impressive company.  My recent talk at MIT was picked up by Google and is hosted as part of their "Solve for X" series of moonshot thinkers.  Link is below.

http://goo.gl/vZzKx

Immigration Reform - "Back of the Line"

Obama said something interesting with his speech about comprehensive immigration reform the other day.  He said that illegal immigrants would need to go to the "back of the line".

For unskilled immigrants, there typically *IS* no line.  There is basically no way to legally come to the US, unless they are family members of existing US citizens. See the chart below.

So, I wonder what he was talking about?  I think immigration reform is a necessary step, but I'm really interested in how this is actually going to be implemented.

Politics and Entrepreneurship

"Obamacare" has been cast as a left vs right issue.  Democrats are in favor of it.  Republicans hate it.  However, the reason for this is that it is framed as a "lazy do nothing people being given healthcare paid for by good, hard-working citizens who already have healthcare".  This is silly, yes.  However, as far as entrepreneurship goes, there should be far more right-wing support for Obamacare than there is.

Why is this?  Because, here in the US, healthcare and employment are very tightly linked.  This is fine for those with a job.  However, it is not so fine if you want to quit your job and start a company.  I thought Obama's remarks yesterday summarized it perfectly:

    "They do not make us a nation of takers; they free us to take the risks that make this country great."

Government programs which allow people to walk away from their job and start something new are critical for new company development.  Entrepreneurship and free enterprise should be cornerstones of the Republican platform, and they should favor any policy which promotes new company development. It seems that this point is being lost in the noise.

The CEO's job

I don't often have the opportunity to post on my blog. Usually what I'm doing with Energy Cache is not something that I can talk about. However, recently I had a great experience that I thought was worth writing about.

The job of the CEO is to best manage the company on behalf of the board, who in turn, represent the shareholders. Therefore, it can be an easy assumption that the CEO reports to the board and attempts to meet their needs. While simplistic, and often generally correct, it is a false simplification. There can exist the possibility that different board members have conflicting needs/desires. Under the "serve the board members" model, this puts the CEO in a difficult role if he or she is trying to make everyone happy.  However, truly serving the board means doing what's best for the company, regardless of whether you make people happy. People are looking at you for the decision on what is right - not what everybody else thinks is right (and certainly, not what's right for them). 

Not making these decisions, even to attempt to address the wishes of those you report to, is a breach of duty.  This is a key distinction why the CEO's job differs greatly from many other jobs out there.  In pretty much every other job, your job is to support your customer, who is almost always the person you report to.  With the CEO, it may seem that the customer is the board, but it isn't.  It's the company.  I'll say that another way.  A CEO may serve at the pleasure of the board, but the CEO doesn't serve the board - he serves the company.

As CEO you aren't paid to be popular. You are sometimes paid to be unpopular - even if the people that you are unpopular with are the ones paying your salary.

I saw that recently, it is something I'm going to regularly have to force myself to remember, and thought it was worth talking about.

The math of turning 40, Time Dilation and Back to the Future

First - Happy Canada Day!

Second, I'll be turning 40 pretty soon and it got me thinking about the phrase "middle age".  It's always been my observation that life is "speeding up".  When I was a kid, the time between Christmas from one year to another seemed to take an eternity.  Yet now, I struggle to remember that 1993 wasn't 9 years ago, but 19!  What's going on?

My theory is that we are terrible at tracking time.  Instead we can track "relative time".  When we are six years old, the time from one Christmas to the next is fully one sixth of our lifetime - in fact, given that, at age six, we may not have any memories earlier than age three, we could conclude that each year is fully a third of our existence.  However, once we reach age 40, each year is only a sliver of our total existence, and thus seems much smaller.  This seems to be the only reasonable explanation of where my 30s went in a blink of an eye.

So, I decided to model this behavior and see what I discovered.  I made the initial assumption that our memories start at age 5 and end, with death, at age 80.  I then figured out the relative length of each year, to determine how long each year feels to us.  The results are interesting:

Let's first look at the cumulative chart.  This example takes the relative age for each year.  By measuring the areas under the curve we can determine the age of equal "relative age", or the ranges of ages which should "feel" the same period of time, taking into account the apparent acceleration of the years.

This shows that the first quarter of our life is over by age 10, the second by age 20, the third by age 40, and the last quarter, by age 80 (which, if you think of the math, makes perfect sense).  If I think of my childhood, this also feels right as well.  My teenage years, which technically lasted as long as my 30s, were a lifetime!  My 30s, I believed, happened when I went out for lunch one day.

So, the horror that we can realize is that 40 is not middle age - 20 is!  By the time you reach 40, you've lived fully 75% of your apparent life timeline.  Even though you are halfway through your life, the remaining years will seem like the blink of an eye.

Another way to look at this is with this graph:

This lets us determine what age corresponds to the percentage of apparent life lived.  For example, as shown, the age at which you have lived 60% of your perceived life is actually 25.  On one hand, this is a clear call to enjoy your youth, on the other hand it shows that we've all been given the gift that our youth lasts a disproportionately long period of time - which is great if you had a good youth, not so great if you didn't.

Now, interestingly enough, these results are driven by the assumption that you have perfect memory of your life, and thus each minute seems progressively quicker than the minute before.  This leads to some interesting conclusions.  The first is that there is a real cost to memories - their cumulative effect serves to make your life appear to go quicker.  So, if at all possible, there's little point fixating and hanging on to bad memories.  Relieving them serves to slow down the perceived acceleration of time.  As well, there is possibly the saving grace that, as you age, your memory of earlier events starts to diminish.  This will put more relative weight in the later years and appear to slow time down.  Looking at the first graph, if you were able to forget the first 10 years of your life completely, then the effect is dramatic on shifting the relative weights of the later years.  Is it possible that there is some benefit to dementia and memory loss in your later years?  I doubt the benefits outweigh the dramatic costs, but it's an interesting thought.

This also leads to some conclusions about kids.  As I watch my kids grow up, I get to experience, vicariously, their experiences.  While overall life is zipping by for me, and they are growing up at an incredible rate (from my point of view), they also help to slow my life down by providing an external reference point to my life.  Time dilation may be part of Einstein's theory of relativity, but its also alive and well between two people at dramatically different points of their life.

So, as I round out the first 75% of my life, and I see that we are almost in 2015, the year at which Back to the Future will be as far from me as 1955 was for my Dad when the movie first came out in 1985 (and led him to say that he felt old!), I can really question the phrase that "life begins at 40".  If it does, then life sure felt like it took a long time getting started.  Enjoy every moment that you live, and savor every good memory you have.  Even if you live to 80, you're just not here very long.