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Codex Audentia

Codex: An ancient manuscript text in book form.
Audentia: Latin for “audacity”.

This is my codex — a working notebook with my notes, experiments, and rambles in their full glory. It is raw, unpolished and unfiltered.

This is not a blog.

You can subscribe to these posts here.

I’m building a 1,000 year company, and writing about the process.

Oct 17

Building a 1,000 Year Company (TOP SECRET)

By DenseLayers, Rambles No Comments
Thomas Edison at Menlo Park

At DenseLayers, we’re taking on some interesting problems.

The first one, which you are already aware of, is to accelerate frontier sciences.

The second one is to build something that will live for at least a thousand years.

In fact, most of the value of DenseLayers will be realized centuries into the future. All we’re doing as the founders is to stand up a few dominos, kick the first few, and nominate other people to place larger and larger dominos in the front, and continue to pass the baton through generations.

Our mission is to make DenseLayers into a train that travels eternally in the right direction. It’s fine that as mortals, we will never see most of the destinations it visits. Such is life.

In fact, if you join DenseLayers, the stocks aren’t to make us rich, they’re to make our grandchildren richer. The joy of the journey and eternal glory is for us.

 

The challenge.

Now, it has come to my attention that building a thousand year company may not be very easy.

So let’s sit down and figure out what needs to happen for this train to keep rolling for a millennium. 

Let’s start with defining the basic problem here, such that even a 5th grader could understand.

There are many conditions that, if met, would cause an organization to live for 1,000 years.

But there is only one condition that can ensure it:

If the organization dies along the way, it regenerates and continues with its original directive.

The other condition would of course be that it never dies in the first place. We’ll get to that later.

As a systems engineer with a background in failure-tolerance, I prefer to assume that the worst WILL happen, and simply build for the ability to recover.

With that, let’s reframe the challenge:

Do everything we can to increase the odds of regeneration, as well as the odds that the original directive will be followed.

In other words, build a company that can keep showing up and live to fight another day.

This framing gives us a lot more room to play with, and a lot more room for mistakes. We no longer have to rely on a silver bullet for longevity, but rather devise a myriad of fail-safe measures that we can “stack” on top of each other.

It’s a classic engineering problem. You simply design a system for resilience and recovery above all.

As a trained systems engineer, and also a former safety engineer for self-driving trucks (in charge of functional safety and designing fail-safe protocols etc), it’s as if this is what I’ve been preparing my whole life for.

Brainstorm

First, let us look at certain organizations that have already cracked the code on longevity:

Universities

Family-run businesses

Religions

Countries / Kingdoms.

…and so on.

By studying what’s already worked in the past, and combining it with new technology, we can craft a realistic, compelling plan for ourselves.

Here are some examples of features (or bugs) we can build:

  1. A clear directive that can be followed for eternity, regardless of how the human species and our culture evolves over time. (“Accelerate frontier scientific research”)
  2. Make it so the data/information contained in DenseLayers is incredibly hard to destroy; as long as a single copy remains, it can respawn the entire network. (Blockchains? Distributed database?)
  3. We have a system for recruiting people that continues to attract people to the cause. (Content marketing / Books / Referrals)
  4. Even if the number of members dwindles to zero, a new individual can join and both get and create value. (YouTube)
  5. If the company fails in one country, it still has roots elsewhere. (PirateBay? Yahoo Japan?)
  6. The company allows disruptive innovation from within. If someone comes up with a technology that makes the current tools obsolete, the company must pave the way for new methods to be successful. (Eg: 3M, Nintendo)
  7. The company’s funds don’t run out — i.e. do not depend on a single source of revenue, always save a portion of income and invest it elsewhere such that the principle remains unharmed and also earns a regular interest. (Universities)
  8. There is a robust system for succession. (Nobel Prize committee? University Leaderships? Democracies?)
  9. Members need as few resources to join and benefit as possible — even the remotest humans can plug into the scientific network with primitive devices. (Facebook?)
  10. …and so on.

 

On the other hand, we can also do things to reduce the risk of death in the first place. In that respect, I have a simple philosophy:

Always offer the best deal that your customers could find in the market.

I often look at the Japanese industry for examples galore. Kawasaki, Toyota, Honda, Nintendo (one of my faves), Sony, Panasonic, and so on.

In the west, you have companies like Disney and Apple.

What I love about the bolded ones above, is that they tried to diversify (not betting the future on a single product), while still being focused on a single purpose.

They were also product-leaders: we keep buying from them mostly because they make really good shit. They even inspire other companies to step up their quality.

An example I love is that Nintendo, after their Game Boy was a massive hit for 11 years, lost dominance to Sony’s Playstation, then made a comeback with the Nintendo DS, and later again made a huge hit with the Nintendo Switch. And this company was founded in the 1880s, with paper card games!

I also like Apple’s example — even though I don’t think much of the new iPhones, the Apple Watch and AirPods (launched after Jobs died) are each multi-billion dollar businesses in their own right. You gotta give the team credit.

I want DenseLayers to similarly keep building amazing tools for scientists and innovators of all ages, forever, and always offer the best wares in the market. The goodest shit, always. If we can build a culture where offering the best products for scholars is more important than anything else, then we should be good to go.

 

***

Here’s a thought I had this afternoon, after a bathroom break while walking back to my desk:

Imagine if (after we’re successful) we plant hundreds of time capsules all over the world, with each capsule containing instructions for how to regenerate DenseLayers (the scientific network), rebuild it to success, and once again plant new time capsules that last a century or two.

We could design the content of the capsule such that it becomes the talk of the town, and also makes a pretty compelling case — enough to inspire one crazy person to take the idea and run with it (which is all we need really).

Anyway — I’ll get back to work now.

 

This article is from my codex.

 

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Sep 17

“Well-made piece of crap”

By Reflections No Comments

The most valuable trait or habit that I’ve developed as an engineer is to “focus on the problem, not the solution.”

Sounds very counter-intuitive. Don’t we usually say the opposite?

The context here is that most people love to complain about problems and then hasten to slap solutions, as opposed to STUDYING problems and trying to investigate why they’re there in the first place — and solving the root cause.

Most engineers are guilty of this. They love to rush to coding as soon as they see a requirement, as if they’ve been bit by a rabid dog and can’t keep their hands still.

The product you end up with is a “well-made piece of crap.”

The best engineers I’ve ever worked with, and those I’ve read about in history, are more interested in solving the problem than in finding a solution.

Yes, there is a big difference between the two. You’re focusing on the right solution, not the first solution that came to mind.

The first approach takes a bit of investigation, thinking, and study — which takes humility that you don’t know everything — and also involves a time delay before you can get to implementation.

The second approach gets you going quickly, but in the long run, you end up having to throw away and redo too much work, writing off huge losses in both time and money.

Now, it’s not like you can’t succeed with “move fast and break things”; I may be wrong, but I’ve heard that companies like Facebook and Angellist famously cultivated and encouraged this kind of culture.

Unfortunately, most companies can’t afford to do so. And they don’t need to — there’s a better way, a best of both worlds.

The key to the conundrum is how well-defined the boundary conditions are.

“Let’s hack something” is a great next step for situations where the problem is quite simple or trivial, and the boundary conditions are clear.

But as soon as you come to a systems problem (such as a UX problem where even a human is involved), then you have to think about what the solution can and cannot do, which quickly eliminates many default solutions that you may have implemented in the past.

In systems engineering, we usually suggest 15% of the project timeline being spent up front on this, with the rest spent on implementation / hacking.

Jul 25

My Business Practices Are “Outrageous”

By Reflections No Comments

I’m nobody to give someone business advice.

Or rather, I’d say there are plenty of people driving lamborghinis and flying private and consistently sitting on the front pages of newspapers whom people could listen to.

I remember flipping through a book by T Scott Gross, the author of “Positively Outrageous Service” as a kid (saw it at a bookstore and it got my attention), and it really blew my mind. Since then I’ve wanted to offer positively outrageous service in every business I do, both at the product level and the service level.

At my company, we do follow some “outrageous” business practices that I was reflecting on today.

1. Our products and services aren’t good or better or even “best” — they’re groundbreaking.

I’m not saying this for shits and giggles. In my career as an entrepreneur so far, I’ve only made and offered things that have either never existed before, or are on a completely different level than anything else on offer.

If it’s not 10 times better than whatever already is, I don’t do it.

The first project: the “Tech Fluent CEO” program, later made into a book. Yes, I realized later that other such products exist. But none of them accomplish anything remotely close to what mine does.

The same goes for both my podcasts — the content is both 10x better and unique.

It often makes it hard to market and explain what I do, and questions like “is there a market for this?” and “how does it work?” are constantly coming up.

Look, I was inspired by SONY when I was 19. In Akio Morita’s book “Made in Japan,” he said that Sony always wanted to look to the future, and build products that would shape the world as they saw it. Every product that Sony brought out, started as a dream — not a number on a spreadsheet.

I have the utmost respect for people who build businesses based on what people are already looking for and lots of demand analysis, but that’s not how my brain works. I’m in the innovation business. I’m in the future business.

We skate to where the puck is going to be, not where the puck is right now.

2. I don’t offer 30-day or even 90-day guarantees. I offer a lifetime guarantee.

Back when I was offering the tech fluency program, the first ever person who signed up (and paid full price upfront), got busy with other projects midway through the course. He never came back.

I tried to contact him over time, to come back, but he couldn’t.

Finally, 4 years later (long after I stopped doing 1-1 coaching and was doing a different business), I emailed him again, saying that he’s always welcome to come back and finish what he started. This time, he did reply, and we will continue our relationship.

On the first page of my book, I say clearly — if you buy the book and realize that you aren’t the right reader for it, you get your money back, no questions asked. There’s no timeline.

50 years later, if you said, “you know, that book I read in my 20s wasn’t really worth my money” – I’d still like to give you a refund.

One reader actually tried to test this, because he couldn’t believe this was true. But I obliged, and this is what he said:

However, I must mention that recently I felt “whooped” by Andy Frisella’s company 1st Phorm, because they offer a 110% guarantee on their products. So we will start offering a 120% guarantee as soon as we are able to.

But hey — I did offer a guarantee on my podcasts too from the beginning – if you find another podcast that covers a topic better than we did, I will give you $20. Andy doesn’t. (Score: 1-1)

The next phase

While the above things are apparent in hindsight, I wasn’t even consciously aware of them when I was actually doing them.

But it’s clear to me that this philosophy needs to be at the center of the entire business; its energy permeating not just the product and service, but everything from marketing, to branding, to operations, to vendor relationships, employee relations, and so on.

Offering a positively outrageous experience to every person along the chain, makes for an indestructible business. And I want to build a company where this is in the very DNA.

Jun 03

All confidence comes from “knowledge”

By Reflections No Comments

What does it mean to be confident, or feel confident, or have confidence?

There seem to be so many contexts.

I had the insight recently that confidence is in how much knowledge your brain thinks it has of what will happen in the future.

In other words, “I know this is what will happen” or “I know this is the truth we will discover” is the only, fundamental source of all kinds of confidence.

You feel unconfident about driving a car in the mountains, or about going up to a beautiful girl in the subway and saying hi, or about a martial arts competition, because you don’t know what will happen. The more you know or think you know, the more confident you feel.

“I will steer the car and it will stay in control and I will get through the mountains without issue.”

“I will walk up to my opponent, and I’m most likely going to beat them because of X or Y.”

“I will say hi to that girl and we will have a lovely interaction; at worst, nothing bad will happen to me, I will feel safe and happy throughout the day.”

The different effective ways of acquiring confidence, whether it’s to manipulate your brain using visualizations and affirmations, or through sheer action and collecting practical experience, or through diligent study and preparation, all have the same basis.

They give you the sense that you can predict the future in that area. It also goes to show why confidence is so subjective. Nobody can be confident about everything.

You may be confident about going on dates women but not about picking stocks (or vice-versa), because with one you can predict the likely outcome, but not with the other.

You can become confident in your ability to do anything, by keeping your promises to yourself everyday. Over time, your brain thinks it has knowledge of the future: that what you say you’ll do will get done.

Mar 26

地獄の資金調達：DenseLayersの話（１話目）

By DenseLayers, Reflections No Comments

背景

2023年の2月に、僕は「DenseLayersをもう一度復活させて、全力で頑張れ」と友達に励まされた。

実はあの時、僕は人生がかなり苦しい時だった。僕が初めて立ち上げた企業が失敗したばかりだった。静かに年以上暗中模索し、じわじわと血が抜けて、最後まで希望にしがみつきながらも事業が終わってしまった。僕はお金については損はしなかったけど、「２年早く諦めたほうがよかったかもしれない」とたまに考えている。それは根性か？意地か？理由は僕にもまだ分からない。青春の2年が犠牲になった。

(これで読者さんに僕の第一のアドバイス: 自分の企業をそういう形で死なせないでください。「バタン」で終わらせる方がいい。)

DenseLayersを全力でやってやる；この決断は簡単じゃなかった。家族にも説明しにくい。

僕にはもうお金は一切なかったし、親ももう財政難を許せないから、今回僕は小額の資金を調達すると決定した。自分にいろんな不安があるとしても、僕はずっとDenseLayersのことに自信があった。絶対どこかの投資家がそれをいいアイデアだと気づくと考えていた。それと、僕はもし今回の資金調達を成功できれば、それがアイデアの質の証明になると思った：もし2ヶ月以内に最低＄15,000も集めることができなかったら、僕は起業を辞めると覚悟した。アイデアとか、自分の実力とか、どこかが絶対問題があるはずだから。

つまり、僕はこのプリーシード資金調達に僕の起業家の人生を賭けていた。

DenseLayersはちょっと特別なプロジェックトだ。王道の企業じゃない。様々な障害があった：

  • アイデアとプロトタイプしかなかった；利用者は０だった。
  • プロトタイプも恥ずかしいくらいにダメだった(笑)。
  • 僕は一人だった。前にテック企業を立ち上げや資金調達の経験もなかった。
  • 人脈は薄かった。たくさんの人が「アドバイス」できても、小切手を出せなかった。（意味わかるね？笑）
  • 市場規模は大きくなかった。（研究者は大体金持ちではない）
  • 非常に新しいアイデアだった。（リスクが高い；僕の計算がピッタリでなければだめ）
  • 具体的にどう儲かるか、まだ分からなかった。
  • 将来、サイトがどうなるのか、具体的に言えなかった。
  • 会社がすぐに拡大できなかった。（DenseLayersはゆっくりゆっくり伸びるタイプのサイトだった）
  • どうピッチするか、投資家に何を言ったら盛り上がるか、全然分からなかった。
  • 皆から「もう経済が落ちたから資金調達するのが難しすぎ」と言われた。
  • 僕はインドからアメリカの投資家たちをピッチしてた；たまに「インドにいる起業家を信用できない」と言われた。
  • 金持ちの家族や友達がいなかった。（それと、誰にも「お金を貸してください」とは絶対言いたくなかった）

一言で言えば、周りの人は誰も僕に期待しなかった。（笑）

だが、僕はどうしても楽観的に進めたかった。意地っぽいからな。

資金調達について、一つ面白い言葉がある：「どんな最低なdealでも、どこかの誰かが絶対喜んで君の愚かなプロジェクトに資金を提供したい」

人は色々な夢見なプロジェクトに、色々な理由で投資する。本当に儲かると思うとか、個人的にプロジェクトに興味があるとか、ただ君を応援したいとか、君の競合が嫌いとか、コクテールパーティー等で自慢して鼻を上げたいとか。

予想外な人から投資された大成功の企業が多い。例えば、StarbucksのHoward Schultzは200以上の投資者に振られて、最後に近所のお医者さんから$100,000調達した。その頃今のStarbucksはアイデアだけだった。

どんなアイデアでも産業でも、どこかで君に投資したい人が絶対いる。その人を探すのが僕たち起業家の仕事だ。

(僕個人の意見かもしれないけど、僕は特別に頭がいい人や人生的に恵まれた人じゃない。逆に、頭だけが良すぎることが邪魔になるとも思う。そういう人は計算ばっかりで、「難しい難しい」と言い続けて何もしない。

君は200回目以上振られても続ける根性があるのか？そこまで自分のアイデアと実力を信じているのか？それがあれば君は絶対勝てる。なければいくら頭があっても起業家の道はきつい。)

僕は次の理由で、絶対投資家を見つけると自信を持っていた：

  1. 第一：必死。本当に人生が掛かっていると思っていた。
  2. DenseLayersのビジョンは大きすぎだ。成功したら人類の歴史が変わることは当然だと思う。そういうタイプの企業だけに投資したい人もいる。それに、アイデアがAIの研究に関係するから、投資することは誰にも恥ずかしくない。逆にかっこいいと思わせる。
  3. アイデアは新しいとしても、僕が数年練り直して準備した。業界を知り尽くしていたから、自分の解決策は正しいはずと思っていた。自信とか、自惚れとか、そういうことも大事だと思う。
  4. 僕は一人だけど、第一流や二流の技術者だ(笑)。プロトタイプは自分で作れる。チームがなくても一人で進める。それに僕はシリコンバレーでかっこいい数社で働いたことがあるから、職歴や資格が問題になるわけないとも思っていた。

結果と教訓

どれぐらいや誰に投資してもらったか、まだネットで言いえない。最初の＄15,000の目標よりはるかに高いとだけが言える。個人的に要望があればピッチスライドを見せる。

厳しかったけど、おかげでこういう教訓をもらったんだ：

  • ピッチはどうするのかより、誰にピッチするのかが大事だ。僕は最初から普通の金融関係者やプロの投資家とか人と話さないと決めた。僕のアイデアに興味を持てる人だけにピッチしてた。DenseLayersが大当たりになれるかより、プロジェクト自体が気になる人に。
  • もし誰かが君にとんでもない細かいことだけを尋ねているなら(特にアイデアの弱点だけに集中している場合)、彼を無視したほうがいいと思う。こういう人は君が何回練り直してても、絶対投資しない。大体投資できるお金も持ってないと思う。ミーティングを早く終わらせて（「今の時点でこのプロジェクトはあなたにとって説得力がないみたい。それが間違いですか？」と言ってみろ）。そして二度と彼にアイデアについて話さない方がいい。
  • 一番大当たりの投資は全部大体最初はすごい愚かな投資のようだ。
    今思うと大当たりするのが当然と言えるけど、最初は全然想像しにくかった。たとえば：

    • ディズニーランド：コカイン中毒者の幻覚のようだ
    • ハリウッドの映画はみんな大博打だ
    • エアビーエンビー：「知らない人が知らない人を自分の家に迎える！」はいはーい。
    • イーロンマスクのスペースエックスやテスラ：君がどっちにもアイデア時点で信じて投資できたのか？
    • ツイッター：マジで、何だそのアイデア？何ですごい投資か説明してほしい。今でも事業計画が明確にできていない。
    • フェイスブック：その頃マイスペースの方は一億人ユーザが多かった。事業計画もなかった。
    • グーグル：ヤフーはその頃もう大企業だった；グーグルも事業計画がなかった。
    • ネットフリックス：創業者が”That Will Never Work”という本を書いて置くくらいの下手なアイデアだった。
    • スターバックス：このコンセプトはなぜ一時代に一度の成功になる、1986で想像できるか？
  • 誰にも自分のアイデアについての意見をもらわない方がいい。理想の投資家やメンターじゃない人には特に。僕は資金調達の準備をする時いろんな”信用できる”人の前で練習した。いつも他人の意見を素直に受け取って、自分のピッチを直していた。でも結局ピッチが全然分かりにくいくらいにぐちゃぐちゃになった。最後に一人の起業家の友達が僕に言った：「君がどんな人と話しても、様々なアドバイスをもらうはず。でも結局全部当てずっぽうだ。起業家は最終的に自分のやり方でやらなきゃいけない。」もしシェフがレストランのお客さんみんなに「この料理をどうすればもっと美味しくできるのか」と聞いて、みんなの意見を受け取っていたら、その料理が元より不味くなる。アイデアやピッチについて意見がほしいなら、アイデアの質やポテンシャルじゃなく、ただ自分の考えと説明が分かり易いか難いか、それと自分は自信を持っているように見えるかどうかだけについて意見をもらった方がいい。

つまり、相手が君のピッチを嫌いだったり、ポテンシャルを全然見なかったりするなら、気にしなくていい。

今度誰かが君のアイデアの悪口を言ったら、ただ「この人はこの50年の全部の大成功企業についても同じことを言ったはずだ」と考えていい。ありがたく失礼して次の会議に。

よく聴け：企業は大体90％がはずれだ。弱点を持たないアイデアは一切ない。「このアイデアがダメ」というのは9/10当たり前だし、こういう単純な分析は誰でもできる；天才がいらない。この見方なら、君のアイデアの否定派はちょっと自惚れすぎのバカみたいだ。

でも全部の意見を捨てるべきやじゃない。たまに誰かがすごい系統的弱点を見つける。こういう時はちゃんと考え直すべきだ。でも「需要がないと思う」や「私は絶対要らない」や「それはもうあるじゃん」と言うのは系統的弱点じゃない。そう言う意見は無視しても大丈夫。需要があるかないか、自分で見つけるべきことだ。たった一人の意見で決めることじゃない。

 

投資をどう探した

詳しく言わずに：

  • 投資家の知り合いが少ないから、そのネットワークをすぐに使い果たしてしまった。
  • 投資家に紹介されることもできなかった（大体の人は変なアイデアに自分の評判を結びつけたくない）
  • だから、自に頼って古典的な方法を使うしかなかった：営業メール。
  • 理想の投資家の長いリストを作って、冒険を始めた。
  • 人のインターンも歩合制で雇った。（投資をもらえないと払わない）彼にリストを作ってもらった。

この資金調達ラウンドは成功だったけど、本当に苦しかった。その時、僕はこの文章の教訓をまだ持っていなかった。たまには、インターンに励ましてもらう必要もあるほどやる気が無くなった。（笑）

結局、次の資金調達まで持ち堪えるには十分だけど、２,３年安泰にドリームチームを作れない。

でもそれでいい。今はとにかく一日でも長く生き抜いて、自分が信じるものを築いて、戦い続けることが大事だ。この資金調達はその夢を叶うための滑走路だ。

さあ、自分も出て、ピッチングを始めて、を金を手にいれよう！

Sep 18

Ruthless

By Reflections No Comments

The word “ruthless” conjures for most people the image of someone who’s evil, brutal, and sadistic.

It’s real meaning, is someone who acts without any pity or compassion for someone’s misery. They are ruth-less.

Another way to see being “ruthless” is someone who acts without taking other people’s opinions and inconveniences into account.

The lines between ruthless, selfish, and egoistic get more and more blurred the more you think about it.

Does it take ruthlessness to win a world championship, when it means denying everyone else who showed up to the tournament, regardless of how much they and their families sacrificed for the opportunity?

Does it take ruthlessness to get selected for a job that only has one opening, when it means denying all other applicants who could have made something of their lives with the job you stole from them?

Does it take ruthlessness to go into business and prevail against a competitor — through better products and marketing — even though their competitor may have some wonderful employees with pregnant spouses whose livelihood depends on their consistent employment?

Does it take ruthlessness to take the life of another plant or animal, for the purpose of one’s own nourishment?

The very act of self-assertion – from smallest to largest — is ruthless.

The least ruthless man in the world probably cannot achieve anything in his life, out of fear that he may inconvenience someone else. He would carry a soul-crushing load of self-doubt to every aspect of his existence, living a pitiful life devoid of hopes or dreams. And in living that way, he is ruthless towards himself.

As we live in a society of other people, our ruthlessness is a reflection of how dependent we feel on others’ opinions for our happiness.

Perhaps “compassion” is, in the end, a front for co-dependence. Compassion for others is, in some ways, our way of saying, “I need to be more ruthful, because it furthers my agenda — being compassionate towards others is the way to be compassionate towards myself.” How much compassion are we inherently born with? Is it an evolutionary trait, or is it something that’s instilled into us? I’m inclined to think it is a bit of the former, but mostly the latter.

I believe that in general, as you become more compassionate towards others, it directly means being compassionate towards yourself. But there is an intersection, a tipping point, where your compassion towards others supersedes compassion towards yourself.

The key to healthy coexistence – with oneself as well as others – is to never cross that intersection of compassion.

Depending on the world you live in, and its unwritten social rules, that intersection can move greatly. In some societies, you can get away with a lot more ruthlessness.

Wow, this post is going longer than I thought… best to clip it here. じゃな！

Sep 17

Not nice

By Reflections No Comments

Afer navigating the professional / business world over the last decade, I’ve come to realize that in general, people are nice.

I’ve made lots and lots of acquaintances, who have helped me in many ways. 99% of people want to do the right thing when given a choice. It doesn’t mean they’ll go out of their way and take personal losses to help you, but they’ll be polite and respectful even if they’re acting selfishly.

But I’ve also learned that quite a few people you’ll meet, including many in prominent, successful positions, are not nice. By which I mean, they’re downright horrible human beings that make you sick to your stomach. You’ll come across them once in a while, and you’ll want to stay clear of them.

Being a good human (or rather, not being a shitty human) is not a pre-requisite to being successful in our chosen endeavours in life.

What matters, is doing the work that’s required and giving people what they want. As long as we help other people get what they want, they’ll try to work with us.

I can recall many times in my life when I was overly nice to people because I felt like I had to be.

So if you’re a “nice guy/gal”, be so because you choose to, not because you feel an obligation to. And wear it with pride.

Sep 13

Animal Plane

By Reflections No Comments

The average human lives in the animal plane.

His priorities:

  • Fetch food and shelter (earning a living)
  • Reproduce (raising kids)
  • Play (often self-destructive or numbing activities)

I wake up everyday with the intention of living on the highest plane I can, as much as I can.

Jul 22

“Science 3.0”: Accelerating the Next 1,000 Years of STEM Research

By DenseLayers, Reflections No Comments

The Challenge

I’m extremely optimistic about humanity’s potential. Human ingenuity is amazing.

But humanity’s progress in science and tech is slower than it should be, and our efforts are laughably inefficient. Our challenge as a species is how to effectively utilize and deploy the sum total of our intellect and resources towards shared goals.

In many ways, we’re still a nascent civilization, and the vast majority of us are still subsisting like other animal species — on average, our daily activity is still oriented around survival (earning a living), reproducing and nurturing our progeny, and trifling pleasures.

Only a tiny few among us are contributing to the technological advancement and evolution of our species, which is, on a macro level, crucial to our long-term survival. And even those who do, face an incredible amount of friction and tough barriers that further slow down scientific progress.

The reason is that humans are extremely limited in their ability to utilize the ideas and experiences of other humans to accelerate their own discovery and problem-solving processes. Here’s why:

  • Knowledge barriers: Our ability to learn is limited. It’s hard to know enough about other disciplines to fluidly extract insights and reapply them. It’s also hard to start, when there is an overabundance of information.
  • Language barriers: Billions of people only speak their local language.
  • Resource & information sharing: Free movement of information and resources (funds, materials, equipment, etc) road blocked by geographical, economic, political, or cultural/social barriers.

These limitations are not due to physics but due to the biological limitations of the human brain.

However, we’ve arrived at a place where all of these problems can be solved, to a large extent, using technology. By building the right tools and infrastructure, we can make untold leaps in our species’ technological journey.

DenseLayers (and its parent company, SANPRAM Research Inc) was founded to work on exactly this mission.

DenseLayers exists to accelerate frontier science.

And we are already making progress, by building several patent-pending tools to address all the limitations mentioned above. As technology advances, our products and infrastructure will keep getting better, and humanity will be able to extract and deploy more and more of its unutilized intellectual power.

Reforming “Science”?

The crux of the issue is to reform the way humans participate in “scientific discourse.”

The format of discourse has evolved greatly throughout history, but a few things have stayed the same: it has always been in small pockets, with limited geographical scale, and the spread of scientific knowledge has been painfully slow.

Science or math would usually travel via trading routes, such as how the Arabs took the zero (0) from Southern India and brought it to Europe. Chinese alchemists invented gunpowder as a medicinal substance decades before they shot their first “fire arrow,” and a good century or two before it started traveling westward in large quantities on the backs of Mongol horsemen.

https://www.studioarabiyainegypt.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/12/The-greatest-ancient-Arab-scientists.jpg

Overall, from ancient universities to “learned societies” (where affluent intellectuals would gather during the weekend to have fun talking science), sharing scientific findings with others has been an extremely informal and organic process.

Once the printing press had arrived, the first science “journals” were born in these very societies (such as The Royal Society of London), in the form of newsletters distributed to their members. Even Benjamin Franklin’s famous experiment, the “Electrical Kite” was first published as a letter to the Royal Society to be discussed by other members!

This was Science 1.0.

This changed in the mid-20th century, with the advent of large, commercial scientific publications and the structured “academic paper.” All thanks to a shrewd businessman named Robert Maxwell — he first decided to go and acquire every physical science publisher across the seven seas.

After capturing the whole market, he told universities that if they wanted to get published at all, they’d have to give him free labour — and then pay exorbitant sums of money each year to access the very publications they helped fill with their content. The process of distributing scientific findings and ideas also became quite formal and bureaucratic.

This is Science 2.0.

We know the rest of the story. Today, “scientific research” is no longer the labor of love and curiosity it used to be for most of mankind’s history. It has become a highly bureaucratic, torturous, lonely profession for thousands of young scholars who are battling with constant depression.

The very research papers that were meant to distribute science far and wide have become harder to read than ever before, even for the top scientists of their fields. They have also become prohibitively expensive to access, making inter-domain knowledge transfer even harder.

At DenseLayers, we are developing a new platform for scientific discourse — a “learned society of global scale” — from the ground up.

It will be the first true global interconnected superhighway for science.

Our vision for the platform is that it will look like a collection of frontier research niches — from Deep Reinforcement Learning to Synthetic Biology — ever evolving and cross-pollinating.

It will be the hub, the go-to place where scholars from across the world, regardless of their language or knowledge background, come to publish, consume, and discuss cutting-edge science, with the same fun, informal environment that it was like for millennia.

This is Science 3.0.

Science 3.0 is about restoring the organic and free-flowing nature of the last 5,000 years of science, while also making it 10x more open and universally accessible.

It will be a tough journey, because this has never been accomplished before, but once it’s done, it will have a civilization-level impact on our future.

A 1,000 Year Vision: Reality or Insanity?

DenseLayers is being built to exist, in some shape or form, for the next millennium or longer. It is attainable. Here’s how.

What kind of human constructs typically last hundreds or thousands of years, intact and thriving?

One might think of the Pyramids. The Great Wall of China.

The Royal Society of London was founded 362 years ago. Its publications over the centuries were the precursor to modern-day academic journals.

But much better examples are social constructs — such as religions (Christianity?), societies and guilds (Freemasons), centers of learning (Cambridge, U.Bologna), and languages (Sanskrit, Armenian).

In a sense, they’re different forms of communities. Any community that continues to add new members over time, effectively replacing the ones who leave or die, can live forever.

Then, there are ideas and information (teachings of Pythagoras, Socrates or Laozi), etc. They too can get transmitted via person to person and far outlive their source.

By organically building a human community at scale, we see no reason why it can’t uphold itself for millennia, continuously evolving with technology. Even as we evolve past the current computer age, eventually transcending planetary boundaries and connecting astronaut-scientists exploring the galaxy.

At DenseLayers, we’re building the tools that the next Isaac Newtons, Aryabhattas, Marie Curies, and Ada Lovelaces will use to expand humanity’s role in the universe.

 

This article is from my codex.

You can subscribe to my newsletters here. But I rarely ever send them.

 

Jun 30

DenseLayers Inspirations: FreeCodeCamp

By DenseLayers, Rambles No Comments

When I think of how I envision DenseLayers’ growth, the model that inspires and influences it the most is Quincy Larson’s FreeCodeCamp. I’ve been a fan of the project since I first heard about it, and it shows a path that I think we can follow as well.

FCC’s biggest advantage was the focus on community-building, and the insight that group-learning is so much better and more efficient than doing it alone. I independently reached the same conclusions about the practice of reading research papers, or for any deep knowledge-building activity in general.

You see the concept of “group study” across all human cultures, from Bible circles in college campuses in the USA (and even Africa), to housewives reading the Little Red Book together back in Mao’s China.

At DenseLayers, we want to enable group-study of and collaboration over breakthrough STEM research, on a species-wide scale.

I read back to how Quincy grew FCC:

  • He started with a tiny prototype (a list of good external resources with a checklist).
  • He also set up a HipChat/Slack group for members to hang out together.
  • On the content/marketing front, they grew by him tweeting a lot, live-coding, writing lots of articles and answering questions on Quora, and posting videos on YouTube with other members of the community.
  • His hiring approach was to simply pick active people from the FCC community itself. (I too have always intended that I’ll only hire people from the DenseLayers community — it’s a no-brainer.)
  • He also setup a publication to which other people could contribute content/tutorials.

The amazing thing is how capital-efficient they are. With only $350K or so in annual spending, they could deliver 2 billion hours of learning in that year.

I challenged myself to get a black belt in Judo in 12 months, training at the Kodokan in Tokyo.

I challenged myself to achieve fluency in Japanese in 12 months. The result blew me away.

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