XMediaLab Session 9: Tom Duterme
From the program: Tom is a New Business Development Manager who assesses new business opportunities for the company. Prior to joining Google, he helped to launch two companies in the Internet and consulting spaces in China, playing the role of CTO and sales manager for both ventures. While in China, Tom also helped multinational corporations negotiate significant market entries there in the form of domestic acquisitions and joint ventures. Tom graduated with a degree in physics from Macalester College after which he accepted a scholarship to attend a university in Beijing to improve his Mandarin. He also has an MBA from MIT Sloan. Tom is fluent in Mandarin and French, and has lived in China, Japan, France, Belgium, and the U.S.
This guy is wonderful! Really humble, even though he’s obviously a genius (of the astrophysicist variety).
Simple Observations
Wires, hammers and rucksacks.
Today’s hammers are incredible! Tools today are cheap! Games (Flash), video (HD camcorders), music (Garage Band), web (blogs, vlogs). The flip side of great tools is distribution, and open distribution is becoming the norm: free, YouTube, social networks, RSS.
Any amateur can create content using tools that are equivalent to what the best professionals were using a few years ago.
Today’s wires are fast and getting faster. Speed is not the barrier. What is cool to think about is that there will be a generation that never has a concept of waiting online.
Rucksacks (like tools) are cheap! Just how much does a gigabyte cost? 1992: $4,000. 2000: $20. 2008: $0.30.
Add it all up, and… the business of starting companies is the right business to be in. It’s a golden age for this. He believes that, in the future, people will look back on this age as another Renaissance in human creativity.
Business of Ideas
People: collaboration. “Some secrets are more valuable when shared,” Ed McCracken. You can’t do things by yourself, so, if that’s the case, wouldn’t it be critical that you bring on the right people? Find those friends who are the right friends to bring on, because those people can help you take your idea to the next level. People that you hire are more than arms and legs; what you’re bringing on is also a body, a mind, a heart; if you can capture that in terms of your core group, you’re already halfway there.
Fulfilling user needs should be the focus. 70-80% of new product development that fails does so because of a failure to understand user needs.
Iterate often. “Big will not beat small anymore. It will be fast beating slow.” — Rupert Murdoch.
The Internet as a platform encourages you to iterate as quickly as you can. You’re online 24/7. Your customers are online 24/7. Small changes, quickly, rather than large, earth-shattering ideas.
He then put up a blank slide with the heading: “Yes, this is a blank slide,” and asked us to imagine a graveyard for dead businesses, a physical place where you could go and pay your respects and read the tombstone. This graveyard has written on every tombstone the cause of death. He thinks not only would this be an interesting place, it may prevent future deaths. What’s the heart attack for businesses?
He thinks the number one killer for new businesses is poor management of cash.
You don’t want to get close to the finish line and run out of cash. When your coffers are out, you can’t pay your employees. The first time, maybe they’ll forgive you. The second time, they might not forgive you, and if they leave they take your business.
Showed some great old pictures from Google: Larry and Sergei in Susan’s garage, Google at Stanford, Google’s first data rack circa 1999.
Today + Tomorrow
“The world we have created today, as a result of our thinking thus far, has problems which cannot be solved by thinking the way we thought when we created them,” Albert Einstein.
If that’s true, his parting statement to us is that in two or three years time, some of the people here will have fundamentally changed reality. If that happens, it would be really cool to trace that back to this conference.
