Background reading and viewing for Wavelength USA

Here we have gathered links to content relevant to the June tour. Some is specific to the companies we are visiting in June, other stuff is more general analysis/commentary about the Valley and ‘big data’. We don’t agree with everything collated …

Here we have gathered links to content relevant to the June tour. Some is specific to the companies we are visiting in June, other stuff is more general analysis/commentary about the Valley and ‘big data’.

We don’t agree with everything collated here but we hope there is plenty here to whet your appetite and give you some meaningful context for our adventures on Wavelength USA. Enjoy!

On our hosts

Southwest

Herb Kelleher: Still Crazy After All These Years – read it here.

We will be meeting Dave Ridley at Southwest. Here is a clip of him at a Wavelength gig earlier this year on how every leader should be a CEO – a chief encouragement officer.

Ritz Carlton “The same message everywhere, every day” Here is a great article on the fundamentals of achieving world class service.

Google Alberto Savoia will be running a ‘pretotyping’ workshop with us at Google’s mission control in Mountain View. Here is an article he wrote on ‘entrepreneurial innovation at Google’

Ideo Tim Brown – who we will meet in Palo Alto – on moving from ‘design’ to ‘design thinking’ and, in this excellent TED Talk, urging designers to think much bigger and deal with problems which really matter. He references Aravind in India and one of our USA delegates – Sriram Ravilla – is from this amazing social business in India.

Pandora “We started this company to help people discover and enjoy music they love, and to help artists reach and grow their audiences. Only in our wildest dreams did we imagine what it would become.”- read more here.

Square ‘Now Processing $10B In Annual Payments; (And That Doesn’t Include Starbucks)’ – read more here.

KIVA Intercontinental Ballistic Microfinance. Brilliant video on explosive growth of this amazing social enterprise.

RocketSpace “We kick out companies when they get to 30 employees.” Fast-rising startups like Uber, Spotify, Kabam, and Leap Motion have all gotten the boot. Read about it here.

Andreesen Horowitz We are spending our last day of Wavelength USA at the Menlo Park HQ of this hottest of venture capitalist firms. Here is a short video interview with the two founders.

On Big Data

1. “Many companies have problems. And they have lots of data about those problems. But they have no idea how to use that data to even ask the right question.”

We will be meeting Arthur Goldbloom the entrepreneur behind Kaggle a big data analytics business working with an increasing number of very large companies.

2. Is big data all it’s cracked up to be? A sceptic writes ….

3. “If you’re disappointed with big data , you’re not paying attention” read on..

4. But what are the larger political and social implications of an era of Big Data? Read about it here.

On Silicon Valley

1. This is a very engaging lecture by Steve Blank on the ‘secret history’ of the Valley, its roots in military research and the Cold War, and how the unique mix of government money, entrepreneurialism, and academia created the foundations of today’s tech scene. Well worth finding the hour to watch it (perhaps put it on your desktop and watch it on your flight).

2. Silicon Valley VCs predict 2013 trends: Space, robots, self-driving cars. Read more here.

3. “Tech has brought very young, very rich people to the Bay Area like never before. And the changes to our cultural and economic landscape aren’t necessarily for the better.” Read more here.

4. “The company you started 20 minutes ago went out of business 8 minutes ago!?” And, finally, a bit of Valley satire, dude.

We look forward to seeing you there!