In 2011, Rob Nail thought he was retired. Never mind that he was only 15 years out of undergrad. He had co-founded Velocity 11, a robotics company that pioneered automation technology solutions for life science laboratories, and in late 2007, he sold it to Agilent Technologies. He had joined the board of Alite Designs, had become an angel investor, and generally enjoyed himself.
He elected to take one of the first executive programs at Singularity University (SU), the Silicon Valley think-tank that offers educational programs and that serves as a business incubator, founded by Peter Diamandis and Ray Kurzweil. Whereas he thought he knew a lot about robotics, his exposure to the big thinkers at SU led him to realize that there was much he did not know, and that he was fortunate to have sold his company when he did because of competitive forces that would have made for tough going in the near-term.
Nail was so taken with SU that he invested time and money in it, and developed a number of ideas for the founders to pursue. Diamandis and Kurzweil were sufficiently impressed to ask him to come on as the organization’s chief executive officer, a role he has held since late 2011.
Today, he believes that the work of SU (among other institutions and enterprises) will lead to a world of abundance. He foresees a time in the next three decades where a middle-class existence in the western world will be accessible to all through exponential technologies. We cover his rationale among other things in this far ranging interview.
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Peter High: I have had the chance to speak with multiple of your colleagues at Singularity University, though none with as broad a purview as you have. I thought maybe, given your high perch in the organization and your long tenure with it since its founding in 2008, you could talk a bit about the unmet need that led to the creation of Singularity University, especially at its founding; as well as how the organization has evolved in the eight plus years since.
Singularity University CEO Rob Nail
Rob Nail: I met Peter Diamandis in 2009 after he and Ray Kurzweil had just started Singularity University. They ran that first program, and I met Peter at another event, and he said, "We just started this thing called Singularity University, and we are going to run these executive programs. You should come check it out.” I ended up attended one of the first executive programs at SU.
I had just had an exit after building a robotics company for drug and cancer research [Velocity 11] over 10 plus years. I sold it to Agilent Technologies, and worked at Agilent for a few years and then left. I basically walked into this executive program – I am a super tech geek so it sounded like fun –thinking I was the expert in robotics and biotech because I just had built a leading business and was in and out of pharma. In that week, I discovered all kinds of things happening in robotics and biotech that I had not known. That was an interesting epiphany. The second thing that hit me was that I learned about things happening in neuroscience and nanotechnology that were converging to potentially disrupt the robotics business that I had built. The second epiphany for me was that I left thinking, “Thank goodness I sold my business when I did because it was in trouble, and I did not even see it coming.”
That was a formative week for me. It was an interesting time when I was looking at broadening my horizons, and trying to find the next big thing for myself personally. I was fascinated by the faculty, the level of thought, the depth of thought, the meta-level of the philosophical conversation, and the potential of the ideas that were coming out of it. I pitched Peter Diamandis on a bunch of ideas: licensing what they were doing to start an online version, starting an accelerator program, and starting a fund to kick off and catalyze some of the ideas that were coming out of the programs. Peter's response was, “Slow down, we just stated, but why don't you come on and help.” At that time, I thought I was retired, and so I said I am happy to help, but I am definitely not taking the job.
Interestingly, where Peter and I aligned – and really the original reason that Peter and Ray started the University – was the insight that technology is moving far faster than most people realize, and the implications of that are extreme. Having an institution where you can go to understand the broad base of technology, but also go deep into understanding the implications on our lives, on our businesses, on our industries, on our society, and even on what it means to be human, is probably an important thing in the world. I took over as CEO about a year after that.
I think we find ourselves at a time where I believe the mission of Singularity University is more important than ever before. Just to give a quick narrative of where we are right now, we just had an interesting period with our election cycle here. We have seen Brexit. We just saw Italy go the way of Populism and sort of changing. I have a strong thesis that this is naturally expected to happen in a time that is rife with so much change. Most people have no idea about what is happening with technology, they just feel it changing every part of their lives. All we read in the front page of the paper is that Amazon Go is going to displace all cashier jobs. We are constantly bombarded with this horrific, negative news about the future. It keeps us in a constant state of anxiety and fear. When you are living in fear, you look for something to hold on to, something stable – and typically that looks like the past. So, I would suggest that Brexit, and Trump, and the Prime Minister stepping down in Italy; these are just examples of people not having a clear vision of a long-term future. They are just operating out of fear, and they are clinging to something that feels normal from the past because they are operating without anyone trying to articulate a long-term vision that we can agree upon, or even a vision that sounds positive, or any relative path towards it.
I believe that the mission of Singularity University is first and foremost to build an awareness of what is happening and what is available, but also to create a new narrative and a new lens for people to look at these technologies and breakthroughs with a long term, optimistic viewpoint. That view point is that exponential technologies are providing us with these capabilities that we never could have even imagined before, and they are going to allow us to solve problems that we never even remotely could have touched before. That can translate into us creating a world of abundance, as we like to call it.
If you look through Moore's Law continuing for some time, through the works of Google Loon and Facebook drones and One Web satellite, everybody on the planet is going to be connected within the next five to 10 years. That means they will have access to the greatest education that ever existed. They can get a free degree from MIT today, imagine what five years from now is going to offer. The XPRIZE has this amazing global literacy prize that is a $50 million-dollar prize to build an app that will take someone from complete illiteracy to reading and writing proficiency with 18 months. They are pretty sure somebody will win this within the next two years. With access to IBM Watson, you get the best health care capabilities. Energy is getting cheaper on a 30-year timeline. It will mean that food and water can be cheap. Taken together, on a 30-year timeline, there is a real path towards us having an upper class, Western U.S.-based lifestyle as a baseline for everybody on the planet, all through exponential technologies.
Peter has a saying that we are going to move from a world of “haves and have nots” to a world of “haves and super-haves.” I think it is fundamentally possible, but it does not feel possible living in the time that we have because we have few visionaries, few people even able to discuss a vision of the future that sounds anything like this. It means drastic changes to the current system, and we know that change is scary and hard, especially when it means having to rewrite a lot of our existing infrastructure system, our economic system, our health care system, our insurance practices, and so on. All these things are being disrupted because of technology.
I would say that the one other thing that we are trying to provoke and inspire is getting more storytellers to think about this world of abundance, and how to fashion true narratives around that. This is critical because most people do not have good imaginations. We are fed these horrible things from the news, from the media, and from Hollywood, where almost any vision of the future that you see through these channels looks like a dystopian Hunger Games zombie apocalypse scenario. There are not many visions that are different for the future. Until we start telling ourselves better stories, we are going to manifest the ones that we are telling ourselves. We are working hard to change that narrative, and then show some credible path, and build a global community that is activated to take the steps to inspire the policymakers, to scale the startups, and to bring in the big development organizations and big corporations that have the wherewithal to make these things real.
High: One of the challenges you highlighted is that the pace of change has never been faster, and in many cases what we are seeing – in politics for one, among the examples you gave – is a reaction to that pace of change and maybe a desire to slow it a bit. As you are immersed in a world where that change is perhaps at its fastest, how do you think about strategy. You talked about the need for a bigger and better vision in some ways, but the substance of that vision, the reality of that is obviously changing to such a dramatic degree, I wonder what sort of time horizon you use for planning. Also, how do you incorporate flexibility and the ability to pivot relative to some of the ideas that you hold dearly as part of those strategies?
Nail: That is where the rubber hits the road. We have worked with enough corporations and startups, and we are based in Silicon Valley, so we have a particular bent around entrepreneurship and the entrepreneurial mindset. For big companies, we call this mindset of experimenting and trying stuff “intrapreneurship.” We see that mindset extending directly to these big societal problems as well.
First, you must have some risk takers. You must have an ecosystem that is supportive of risk takers and is catalyzing them, and then you have to protect and support those experiments and learn from them and keep experimenting. One critical insight that we have learned is the concept of scaling at the edges. Do not try to revamp the core business or the core systems that you have in place, do not try to hit those head on. Try to run experiments on the side where maybe it is completely stealth or unseen until you get a critical mass, or you have iterated enough to the point where you know what the path is. Once you find the right experiment that is working, and you scale it to a point, then you scale it from the edges and make it real, so it eventually displaces or replace the core. There is a lot of art to how you integrate that into business, or bring it back. That is a big part of the learning curve that we have explored. In Exponential Organizations, one of the books that came out of Singularity University, we looked at how you organize around these exponential technologies.
Another issue is that we have an extraordinary global community. We have more than 20,000 alumni out of our 110 countries who have come to our core programs, and more than 100,000 people interacting through different venues and online threads. We also have interacted with a lot of governments, a lot of Mayors of major cities, as well as Presidents and Prime Ministers around the world. There is a real hunger – largely based on fear – of what to do. They see this stuff coming but they do not know what to do, so we hope to leverage our community to inspire new experiments to be done.
For example, we say there is a big need in education to create a new skill set, and about three years ago, the President and the Vice President of Uruguay invited us to do a program for all the Ministers and Heads of State and others industry partners to inspired them about our vision for the long-term future. We got to meet all their industry leaders and startups that are there, and we came to discover that in Uruguay, 100 percent of the kids have laptops or tablets now in primary, secondary and technical schools. That was a huge public-private partnership to make sure there was connectivity and power and services. The next phase is teaching robotics classes in public schools in Uruguay to five-year-old kids. Imagine five and six-year-old kids learning coding and robotics. What will Uruguay look like 15 years from now? Seeing that as an interesting model, and then sharing that example with other regions that are testing different educational models is something that we can do quickly through the different venue and the different forms that we are taking.
Right now, we are trying to look for and classify the types of experiments that are being run by startups, by policy makers and by corporations that are tackling some of the grand challenges, and then spread those best practices as quickly as we can. It is about finding the ones that are working, finding ones that failed, and understanding why they fail. We try to take a little more of an academic approach to understand it, but then sharing best practices and getting behind and helping scale the ones that are good. That is where Singularity University becomes a platform for identifying and scaling amazing ideas that are going to tackle the most important problems long term, and doing so through a rapidly growing community of partners and individuals.
High: Core to Singularity University is the notion of exponential technological progress, accelerating change and the abundance mindset – the idea that there is no problem that cannot be solved with the right combination of technology, people and capital. I am curious, as you have seen larger more well established organizations begin to grasp some of these ideas and seek to implement them, what sorts of best practices have you seen? I can certainly understand that startups building their technologies and setting up their processes for the first time have an advantage, but what have you seen for larger organizations that need to reboot to some extent to realize the advantages that you have described?
Nail: The first step to solving a problem is admitting that you have a problem. It is interesting to see how many companies are still fighting some things that we already believe are inevitable. One example is how hard the car industry has pushed back against electric cars and autonomous vehicles. Suddenly, over the last two years, there has now been this incredible panic. Look at the deals that are done and the money that is spent on startups that have anything AI on their web page. It speaks to the fear of completely being left behind, when we think it is obvious it was coming. It has been coming for quite a while, but [traditional automakers] have been thinking it was a linear path and have been missing it. In short, we are seeing companies jump quickly on recognizing that there are issues, and then work hard to figure out how to understand them. There are a couple of flavors of that.
One is to engage with innovative technology groups to figure out what it means for them. SU runs a lot of programs for executive teams and boards to help give them some of our insights into the big changes that are occurring long term. Companies that take the next step to create a real tech scouting initiative internally are out making investments in startups and technology companies so that they at least carve out a group that is playing and experimenting and seeing on the ground what is happening in these spaces. That is a best practice.
The concept of building uncommon partnerships is something that I think is unique to SU, it is something that we have a bit of practice around. When we suggest a partnership between a corporation and a startup or a development organization like UNICEF or the world food program, they often have no idea why they would ever care about those organizations other than their philanthropic foundation groups, until they realize that the world's biggest problems could be their biggest business opportunities. We have got a couple of interesting case studies that I am hoping we can publish soon about a few big companies that took our challenge to explore these parallel spaces that are presented by these Global Grand Challenges. They realize that resources and assets of some of these big corporations just realigned towards the biggest problems look a lot like parallel markets that were never imagined before. Looking at the challenge space in a new way, I think, is another best practice that we have seen some companies do, and are launching new business units on.
Finally, picking up the pace is an important one. Investing in exponential technologies that are going to help their internal businesses move at a different pace. These technologies can include machine learning, data analytics, and the various forms of deep learning are things that almost every business today can use to help incremental innovation with core businesses. Then there are resources like crowdsourcing of design, any kind of work product that taps into a huge global pool, and increasingly an exponentially increasing global pool of smart people that organizations can leverage through some of these amazing crowdsourcing apps. There is an art to how to do that successfully.
Companies that take these various initiatives, we believe, are much more exponential in nature and are going to have a bigger chance. It must start with a huge sense of urgency that must be directly supported by the CEO of an organization. Otherwise, it will just be killed off by the internal antibodies, which is bureaucracy and other things that are set up to kill off crazy ideas or that look different than the core. We have seen a lot of companies work hard at disrupting themselves and taking them seriously. I think that is the way to do it.
One big company that we have worked with loosely, but is probably is one of the biggest companies I have seen to do this, is GE. They are making a massive transformation, recognizing the value of their business is shifting to software, data, and analytics. They are trying to reinvent their skillset, their workforce, their business, and who they are without losing the value of the business today. It is a delicate march. I do not think the market yet is sure whether they are going to pull it off, but they have come a long way over the last couple of years through some efforts to be intrapreneurial in nature, to focus on innovation, and to really understand the shifting tide of the industrial Internet – what they call the Internet of Things. There are some interesting case studies of companies doing things in new, novel ways because they have to. They are going to disrupt themselves by changing, or they are going to get disrupted by somebody else.
High: Another interesting union that Singularity University helped foster was the one between Lowe's and Fellow Robots. Using that as a case example, I would be curious what that exemplifies in terms of how SU gets involved when a traditional organization like Lowe’s or GE is interested in doing something creative. Can you talk a bit about that process and the extent to which that exemplifies what others might do in a similar vein.
Nail: The first thing was having Lowe's truly invested. [Executive Director of Lowe's Innovation Labs ] Kyle Nel is an extraordinary intrepreneur, someone willing to take risks internally, to buck the system because he sees a bigger vision, and is going to drive regardless of what sales or legal or marketing or anybody else thinks or wants. Kyle really took that on. He came to SU, and we helped him identify a handful of different projects. He was already visionary in his own right, but we gave him a new lens to work off. We then introduced him to our community and our network. He was looking at robotics and thought “this is cool stuff, but is there anything real?” Over a casual conversation at SU, we introduced him to Fellow Robot, and they started brainstorming. They came up with the idea of having a robot in a store and realized they could easily test it. It was interesting because when Kyle first pitched it, Lowe’s first response was “that is a stupid idea. We have an app that pretty much does all that stuff. Why would we spend money building robots. Nobody is going to like that.” Kyle built it anyway. It was just going to take three months to prototype, and he figured if his team could show the company’s leadership something, then they would go a lot farther than just telling stories. He ended up doing that, and it shifting the perspective of management quite directly. I should note that he would not have been successful if the CEO did not have his back. There were a lot of groups that wanted him fired because he was not following protocol or listening to sales and marketing.
There are so many interesting parts of the story I wish I could tell, but the key pieces for me are that Kyle is an intrapreneur who basically said “I think this is the vision, I think this is where we can go, and I think this is the right thing. If you do not think so then just fire me.” That was his constant mode, and that was amazing. For us, the partnership between Lowe’s and Fellow Robot is a great example of what our ecosystem can bring. The reality is that Lowe's, a big Fortune 200 company, speaks a totally different language than a little startup in Silicon Valley. There is a real skill set needed to bridge the communications between these two different entities. These are different types of organisms. You have this little startup who engaged a lawyer to set up their legal documents as a corporation, and you have Lowe’s with a huge legal staff of one hundred plus people saying “hey, here is our hundred-page legal document that we need you to sign to do our initial partnership pilot exploration. Fellow Robot says “That is going to cost us $100,000 to have a lawyer look at it, we cannot afford to do that.” Clearly, there is a real disconnect between their fundamental operating modes, and it requires certain skills just to facilitate these different types of partnerships. Lowe’s had the wherewithal and the drive of somebody like Kyle who pushed his legal team to try to change how they operated. We had some folks trying to help Fellow Robot change their junior, naive startup guys that do not understand corporations at all. We helped them speak a different language. Between the two of them, eventually they had a common commitment to the long-term vision and the drive to get it done – and they got there. It was a tough process, but I think once they got over that first hump, they were so aligned with the long-term vision that it really propelled them forward. A couple of months ago they announced they were rolling out the robots to the rest of their stores.
There is a similar story with Lowe's and Made in Space as well. Lowe's has done a crazy project with 3D printers in space. They also have a whole bunch of VR stuff that they are exploring. This time next year, I am guessing there will be some stuff that Lowe's has presented, and it will be clear that Lowe's is not a big box retailer – they are an innovation company as much as anything. It is extraordinary to watch that kind of transformation occur with the business. Kyle drove that. It all starts with that that person who has a vision and a relentless entrepreneurial drive, a little naiveite, a lot of stubbornness I would say, and of course a lot of support from the right people. Combine all that, and real change can happen.
That is one of the things that we look for in all our partners at every level. You need to find someone who is going to help own whatever that long term vision is, and not give up along the way. I think that is one of the things we need for our startups, for our corporations and for our governments. Back to how I kicked us off, I am nervous that we do not spend any time talking about the long-term future. There are too many big changes coming because of technology, and unless we have a long-term vision, we are just going to fight over what is hitting us day after day.
Peter High is President of Metis Strategy, a business and IT advisory firm. His latest book is Implementing World Class IT Strategy. He is also the author of World Class IT: Why Businesses Succeed When IT Triumphs. Peter moderates the Forum on World Class IT podcast series. He speaks at conferences around the world. Follow him on Twitter @PeterAHigh.
