Recap of TED 2013

TED is an organization devoted to Ideas Worth Spreading, mainly through the free distribution of 8-to-18-minute TED Talks - originally about technology, entertainment and design, but now TED covers heftier global topics such as climate change, poverty and education reform. TED hosts hundreds of events around the world but the main event is an annual invitation-only conference that attracts the most accomplished scientists, academics, politicians, writers, artists, inventors, entrepreneurs and entertainers.

TED 2013, which took place last week in Long Beach, CA, was my eighth TED. My best TED moments were conversations with Julia Sweeney, Michael Shermer, Sam Harris, Jill Bolte Taylor and Amanda Palmer.

As in prior years I have ranked the TED Talks below so that you can quickly decide which ones to watch. If you disagree with my rankings, please comment! For those of you who have pointed out my tardiness in publishing this year's list, I apologize. On the bright side, my review is so late that many of the talks are already available to watch on TED.com as you read this, so I have linked to those talks below.

This year the TED staff followed a new process for selecting TED speakers. Rather than simply invite interesting people, they attended TEDx events and selected the best speakers from those. The result was a set of TED Talks that were consistently more engaging and entertaining than in all prior years (especially compared to last year). The only downside is that fewer talks conveyed novel and important news or developments - many offered more form than substance.

So here are almost all of this year's TED Talks in order from best to worst (measured by TED Balloons even though the giant TED Balloon was mysteriously missing this year):

10 TED Balloons

Anas Aremeyaw Anas This undercover journalist exposes horrible crimes in Africa, by inserting himself into prisons, hospitals, and other hotspots of abuse. He has exposed enough powerful bad guys that he had to wear a mask on the TED stage.

Lawrence LessigLessig is such a strong, experienced lecturer that he has an unfair advantage being compared to other speakers! Lessig's talk on the need for legislative reform in Washington is riveting and compelling.

Jack Andraka 15 years old, Jack invented a fast $3 method to detect pancreatic cancer, at a Johns Hopkins lab. He won the Intel Science Fair so I'm presuming it's real!

John McWhorterThis linguist presents a compelling argument on why we should all stop worrying about the decay of English skills among texting teenagers. He reviews the successful adaptation of language to other technologies, and considers how English still evolves today.

Eleanor LongdenDiagnosed with schizophrenia, Eleanor's life was "shattered" with medical treatments, discrimination and isolation. But Eleanor overcame the terror, talked to the voices, and began to understand them. She still hears the voices (even during her TED Talk), but she feels recovered, working as a psychologist herself and counseling people who hear voices.

Adam SpencerAdam shares his enthusiasm for numbers. With lots of self-effacing nerd humor, he gets the audience laughing about math!





9 TED Balloons

Hyonseo Lee A South Korean activist tells the story of her family's escape from North Korea.

 

Elon Musk interview
Elon needs no introduction from me. What a hero, and humble, too.

Taylor WilsonAt 14 he produced fusion, and now he's a Peter Thiel fellow. Taylor came to tell us about his new inventions. This talk is especially inspiring for teens. 



Phil Hansen
This talk is a great life lesson from an artist who had to leave his comfort zone when his hand developed a shake. He embraced the challenge, and even set new limitations on himself to see how he might embrace those as well! For example, what if he could paint only on his own body, or use less than a dollar of supplies, or be forced to destroy whatever he creates?

Freeman Hrabowski
Freeman, President of the University of Maryland, has a mission to help underprivileged minority students graduate in the sciences.  His talk has no real point, but it's stirring and entertaining, with some good stories from his days with Martin Luther King Jr.

Ron Finley

"Plant some shit," is the message of this South Central resident. Frustrated with the lack of fresh produce in this low-income part of LA County, Ron began a movement to plant fruit and vegetable gardens on the small grassy areas between sidewalks and streets. First he had to get the police off his back, but now his phone rings off the (proverbial) hook as neighborhoods everywhere want to emulate it. Coincidentally I happened to brunch with Ron at a mutual friend's house two weeks after TED, and he is a riot. 

Richard Turere

Hear the inspiring story of a 9 year old Masai boy from Nairobi who took apart a radio and then invented a way to protect his cows from the lions.








Stuart Firestein 
Chairman of the Biology Department at Columbia spoke on Ignorance. As Maxwell said, "Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every advance in science." There were 1.5m scientific papers published last year - 3 per minute. Every answer we find raises 10 questions, and so our ignorance expands! This talk was intelligent and entertaining, even if it did lack any real practical point.

Ajit Narayanan

Ajit describes an impressive system for language translation.

Amanda Palmer

The singer-songwriter tells a great story of a Wesleyan coed turned rocker and describes her unusually personal relationship with her fans.

8 TED Balloons

Stewart Brand

A famous environmentalist explains how he and some others are preserving DNA of extinct species in order to one day to restore those animals to Earth, "undoing harm that humans have caused in the past." He expects the Passenger Pigeon to be their first return guest. (Really?)

Liu Bolin

This Beijing-based artist is now known as The Invisible Man for his series of politically motivated paintings in which he disappears into various backgrounds.

Nilofer Merchant

I normally don't rate the 3-minute audience talks, but this one was great. According to some studies ragarding back pain and heart disease, sitting is the new smoking. So Nilofer adopted "walking meetings" in her job. I have since adopted this practice myself; I love it, as do my meeting guests.

Kees Moeliker

Watch this very funny presentation on how this duck expert won an Ignobel Prize. Warning: includes homosexual animal necrophilia!

Dan Pallotta

Dan makes a compelling case that philanthropies would be far more beneficial if they set aside their obsession with efficiency. Just as for-profits do, charities should be willing to spend money to attract the best and brightest people, and to market their mission to donors. 

Edith Widder

Edith gives a great account of how she and two others got the first video ever of giant deep sea squid. Attract the animals - dont scare them.

Beardyman, Champion Beatboxer. 
If TED posts this talk, watch the first five minutes (it's amazing) and skip the rest.

BLACK

BLACK is the world champion at Yo-yo, which he has now elevated to a performance art.

7 TED Balloons

Miranda Wans and Jeanny Yao

Continuing the theme of teenage inventors, these girls presented their science fair project on how they found bacteria that can break down plastic garbage.

Rose George

This is an interesting and important talk on the sorry state of sanitation around the world today.

Lisa Bu

Lisa gives a fun talk on how books have helped her throughout life.

Peter Singer

How can we best help our fellow human beings? Princeton Ethics Professor thinks analytically about this question, challenging us to step up our contributions.

6 TED Balloons

Erik Brynjolfsson, MIT Professor

Tech progress is accelerating, and productivity has increased more in the 2000-2010 decade than the prior three decades. It is the New Machine Age where computers enable many other productivity advances, just as prior revolutions did. The internet is digital, exponential, and combinatorial. Today the  growth in productivity comes not from machines themselves but from novel ways to use them. The world's chess champ today is neither the best player nor the best computer - it is a team of good players playing with common computers.

Also when economists measure economic growth, they miss a lot of economic value, such as the $300 billion of free internet content. Incorporating those gains indicates a higher standard of living.

But it's not all sunshine and rose. The tech boom does displace a lot of jobs, so people have to embrace the tech changes and adapt to it.

Later on Erik and I debated as to whether the tech boom of the last decade will ultimately be a net creator or detractor of jobs. Erik says detractor.

Denise Herzing

Denise is the Jane Goodall of Dolphin studies. She studies these self-aware, tool-wileding animals who, next to humans, have the highest ratio of brain-to-body volume.

Rodney Brooks, roboticist

Rodney presented Baxter, a safe friendly industrial robot. Rather than build cold robots that displace people, he believes robots need to be easy, safe and friendly so that workers and consumers embrace them in every part of their home and work life. Baxter is porgrammable simply by moving his arms around as you want him to do.

James Lyne

The founder of Sophos surveys today's cybersecurity threats.

Meg Jay, therapist 
Meg counsels 20-somethings to take life more seriously - not to waste away their decade. (This is the Republican counterpart to Steve Jobs' advice to explore, not worry.) Bad advice, but well delivered!

Danny Hills

Disappointing talk by an impressive scientist/engineer/author/inventor.

Alex Laskey

The CEO of Opower gave a well delivered talk. He reported that the best way to get utility customers to conserve energy is to show them how they compare to their neighbors.

Dong Woo Jang

Fun story of a boy's fascination's with bows and arrows. 

5 TED Balloons

Allan Savory

Allan discovered that despite common knowledge, animal grazing actually prevents desertification.

4 TED Balloons

Orly Wahba

Orly passes out cards to people reminding them to be kind.

Leyla Acaroglu

Better design can promote conservation.

Neil Gershenfeld, Peter Gabriel, Vint Cerf

This all-star team hopes to extend the internet to species beyond human beings, and not just terrestrial species! Their videos of animals "using the internet" were not compelling.

Bono

Celebrated the progress being made in fighting extreme poverty in the world. He promised to give a fact based talk but there was a lot of literal hand-waving and aimless rambling.

3 TED Balloons

Lesley Perkes

Lesley perpetrates a hybrid of art and vandalism in Johannesburg.

Robert Gordon

This reputable professor came to argue that the secular pattern of economic growth is over, but his presentation was surprisingly lame.

Gordon observed that we saw big advances in the twentieth century due to electricity, plumbing and computers. But now there doesn't seem to be anything on the horizon to drive as much growth in the standard of living and economic growth. He echoed the patent officer who in 1899 declared that everything that can be invented has already been invented, and Lord Kalvin who deemed it impossible to ever again make discoveries in physics. His evidence that innovation is done is that he himself can't figure out what those innovations will be!

Gordon argued that the long term 2% growth rate will be diminished by headwinds of debt and inequality. As if there were never any headwinds in the past, such as war, disease, inequality and recession!

Gordon piled on with ridiculous, grumpy Grandpa comments, like "How does Twitter help an unemployed auto worker?" and "How can there be progress when airplanes go no faster today than they did in the 70's?"

After, he and Erik Brynjolffson debated as to whether things will get better or worse. Erik was respectful and Robert was downright rude and petulant. When Chris polled the audience, Robert blurted out "You cheated!" and then "I saw at least ten hands go up for me that weren't there before!"

Sebastiao Salgado

Photojournalist showed stunning photos of human suffering, then told how he restored the rainforest to his family land in Brazil, planting 2 million trees. After, his photo journalism became much more upbeat, showing the success of local species including humans.

Michael Green

Michael thinks wooden skyscrapers would be ecologically better than steel, and not fall down, go boom.

Jinsop Lee

Jinsop is an industrial designer who believes that you can improve customer satisfaction by incorporating more senses into every product experience.

Saki Mafundikwa

Saki opened a school of graphics art design in Zimbabwe.

Kate Stone

Kate presents the extraordinary invention of interactive paper. Would have been interesting in 1998.

2 TED Balloons

Yu Jordy Fu

Yu presents photos of her sculptures and interior designs, telling us how beautiful they are. "Wouldn't everyone want this?" Well, no.

Wang Li

Performs "music" on a ukeke and a calabash.

1 TED Balloon

Saskia Sassen

Saskia talks about city development.

Trading Futures

And here's Avery's latest film, "Trading Futures" which he wrote and directed. This courtroom drama features Avery's whole family, and also debuts the talented Sunil Nagaraj. (Sunil was working at his desk last Saturday afternoon when Avery was shooting and needed another actor, so Avery roped him into it.)

Science Fair

I found this story on my laptop. My son write it in sixth grade, and since it's about computer security, I thought it qualified as blog content. (Any resemblance to real persons, living or dead, should not be too surprising.) Enjoy.

“Back so soon?” the school’s secretary asked rhetorically, “I’ll tell the principal you’re back.”

As John waited for what seemed like a long time, he scored a kind smile from Kelly Barrett, the Vice-Principal. “Hi, John,” she said as she passed by.

Finally, Principal Melon poked his head out the window and commanded in an annoyed tone, “John will you come in here?”  An annoyed John walked in the office of an annoyed Principal.

Once they were seated Mr. Melon told John, “Your teacher says you have been misbehaving again. Instead of reviewing your STAR test answers you were just sitting there reading.”

“I already checked them,” John replied.

“Well you should have checked them again. These scores - I mean the tests, are very important to our school. Now give me the book. You’ll get it back in a week,” said Mr. Melon. He then took the book from John’s outstretched hand. “Rules are there for a reason John.”

After school, John rushed over to his afterschool class in the computer lab and logged on to one of the computers and started to work on his science fair project. To prove or disprove his hypotheses, “most computers are highly vulnerable to attacks”, he tried different ways of hacking the school computers. He thought that it should be fine if he tried school computers because it was a school project. He started with a basic worm. He got onto Mr. Melon’s Computer and saw three files. After putting a little marker on the computers, he walked home.

The next Thursday did not go well.

“I’ll tell Mr. Melon you’re back.”  The school secretary went to Mr. Melon’s door and told him something. Mr. Melon seemed upset.

 “This is not all right. As a consequence for doing your homework during recess instead of at home, I want you to stay 30 minutes after school on Thursdays and clean up the eating area.”

“Is there any other day I could do this?”

“No.”

“I have a Computer Lab class then.”

“I know. That’s why I chose Thursday”

“I need that time for my Science fair project”

“Well then you’re banned from the science fair. Problem solved. And remember, rules are there for a reason.”

“One question”

“What?”

“Can I pleasehave my book back?”

“NO!”

Vice-Principal Barrett watched John leave, looking as glum as he did.

On Wednesday night John showed up at the Science Fair even though he was banned. Mr. Melon saw him right away.

“What are you doing here?”

“I’m here to prove or disprove my hypotheses.”

“Well go away and take your hypotheses with you.”

“My Hypotheses is ‘School is improving with Mr. Melon’s great principal skills’.”

“Fine, you can present.”

John got up on stage and explained, “ Hello, My hypotheses is ‘The School is improving because Mr. Melon is a great principal’. This is a common belief among the staff.” He pulled out a piece of paper and asked his Science teacher, “Ms. Billiard, have you seen this before?”

“John, what are you doing?”

“Yes,” she answered, “It was the new policy sheet. We all had to sign it”

John pulled out another sheet, “Ms. Billiard, have you seen this before?”

“Don’t listen to him”

“Yes,” she answered again, “It was the STAR Test Monitor sheet.”

John held the papers close to each other and looked at the judges.

“John, come over here!”

“While I was in Mr. Melon’s office, I saw some STAR Test Envelopes open and in the trash bin. I thought they were extras but now I realize not.”

By now Mr. Melon was almost dragging John off the stage.

“I see now that Mr. Melon has been replacing the test envelopes with new ones and using the signatures from the policy sheets on them. He must have been changing the answers to improve he school’s test scores.”

“John, this is an outrage!”

“You’re right, Mr. Melon. My science fair project failed to prove its hypothesis, since I had to throw out all the bad test data.”

The judges were shocked. Mr. Melon slumped. “John, why would you do this?”

John replied simply, “Rules are there for a reason, Mr. Melon.”

One week later, John found himself once again sent to the Principal’s office. The secretory wasn’t there so he knocked on the principal’s door and heard “Come in.”

Sitting at Mr. Melon’s old desk was the new Principal, Kelly Barrett. “Hi John. Tough day?”

“I guess so.”

“Sorry to hear it. You know I never congratulated you.”

“For what?”

“For winning the Science Fair! I think that earns you a free pass today. But try to pay more attention to your teachers, John, okay?”

“Okay.”

“And before you go, I have one question.”

“Um, okay.”

“I found this in my desk. Is it yours?”

John smiled as he reached over and retrieved his book.

“Thanks!”

Turning Lemons into Lemonade!

Eliot is reading Gary Paulsen's Hatchet, so the question arose tonight at dinner: if you were shipwrecked on a barren desert island and you could wish for three things, what would they be?

 The two boys suggested many variations on the themes of a radio and an airplane. Finally someone asked my daughter, who replied: "I would want wildlife, trees, and my family."

Ringing the Bell

Disclosure: Bessemer is the largest shareholder in LifeLock, but like our co-investors Kleiner Perkins, Goldman Sachs and Symantec, we did not choose to sell any stock in today’s offering. I serve on the company’s Board of Directors, as I have done since our Series A investment in 2006. The following is my personal opinion.

Today I stood by Todd Davis’ side as he rang the NYSE bell to begin the trading session, marking the day of LifeLock’s IPO. Although I don’t expect to be out of Lifelock stock any time soon, I already consider it one of my proudest investments. At a time when digital technologies increasingly expose our private data to theft, Lifelock provides security directly to millions of Americans, and indirectly to over a hundred million Americans through the company’s enterprise services. LifeLock is leading the way to cloud-based protective services, the inevitable future of data security.

Our Series A investment in LifeLock shows off Bessemer’s road map methodology at work. Before we ever heard of the company, we had developed an investment hypothesis around the need for services that authenticate consumer transactions, in order to stem the rapid rise of financial identity theft. We had learned a lot from watching Cyota defend online bank accounts (before we sold it to RSA), and realized that similar out-of-band authentication technology was needed more broadly. (At the time, we identified fraud alerts as the best way to authenticate transactions, but today there are more effective, comprehensive, and less intrusive ways to do it.)

So we actually met every other startup in the space – most of whom were rich in Silicon Valley credentials. But we couldn’t find the combination of technology, service and marketing that you need to sell consumers, which was discouraging.  We finally heard about a small team in Tempe working on the problem, so James Cham, Brian Neider and I flew out to Arizona to meet them.

There we met Todd and the other 9 employees. What immediately distinguished them from their competitors is that LifeLock prioritized the customer experience. They prided themselves on their young but high touch service department. They lived for customer testimonials, and displayed them proudly on the wall. This service orientation really forced the company early on to meet the challenge of simplifying the message around a complex technology product. Rather than try to solve all the technology problems up front, they outsourced as much of their infrastructure as they could to cloud providers, and then proceeded over the years to thoughtfully develop (or acquire) proprietary secret sauce, as they grew. In most successful startups, innovation plays a large role early on, while sales and marketing have to catch up; LifeLock has executed the reverse – the Company is investing more today in proprietary product development than ever before.

The team also impressed us with their transparency, and hunger for criticism. They weren’t getting calls from other VCs, and so they resolved to use our meeting to learn what they can from us about online consumer subscription models, potential partners in the security space, and general startup questions. To this day LifeLock enjoys a culture that marries ambition and humility – they are never afraid to admit their mistakes, and they do not get discouraged.

And there were times they might have been discouraged. LifeLock has disrupted an industry that had been dominated by reactive credit monitoring products from providers who actually sell customer data for a living.  These deep pocketed competitors challenged LifeLock legally, and said some nasty, untruethings about the company and founders that provoked a lot of scrutiny from regulators, investors, journalistsand partners.

Lifelock rose to the occasion, embracing every criticism as an opportunity to improve. Lifelock moved past fraud alerts (which relied on the creditor or merchant to call a consumer), developing an ecosystem of data partners who provide Lifelock with real time alerts to commercial transactions as they happen. Earlier this year, Lifelock acquired the largest of these partners, ID Analytics, which applies predictive analytics to spot fraud using 750 billion consumer identity elements collected over a decade from their enterprise clients. Lifelock now indisputably provides broad, real-time protection that no one else can provide.

At LifeLock we got the chance to work closely with the team on strategy (including some IP we contributed) and recruiting – between Bessemer’s GC Scott Ring and me, we’ve exchanged nearly 10,000 emails with the LifeLock team. Although Todd had startup experience, and sales experience at Dell, he had never run a large company. I think a lot of VCs would have just hired a “professional CEO”, but I’m now a richer man for having bet on a founder who has been absolutely relentless in his passion to stamp out identity theft. Todd overcame his own inexperience by hiring world class executives like Marvin Davis (former CMO Comcast), Chris Powers (CFO/COO Netqoute, Salary.com, Monster), Prakash Ramamurthy from Oracle, former White House lawyer Clarissa Cerda, Larry McIntosh (SVP McAfee), and most recently Hilary Schneider (EVP, Yahoo!).

It has been a unique pleasure to work with Todd. Last night I had the pleasure of meeting his parents, and I realized how informative it would be for me to meet the parents of every founder I back! It’s clear to me now that Todd’s extroverted charm, humor and humility are inevitable expressions of his genes. His mother quietly told me how the family had sacrificed to support Todd’s enrollment in Baylor’s entrepreneurial program, and his early startups, but that “Now, it was worth it!” When their son arrived to meet us, worn from seventy investor pitches around the country, proud tears graced her cheeks.

Based on our experience in LifeLock, Bessemer has been able to refine our road map in consumer security and privacy. We are now also lead investors in Reputation.com, which helps its customers take control of what the internet says about them, and BillGuard, which protects users from credit card fraudand other unwanted transactions.

I’ve been fortunate to see twenty of my startups go public, but I’d never before come to New York for the event. (Maybe it’s because most of them went public during The Bubble, when IPOs were too easy!) But somehow this one was different, and I just had to be there personally to hear this bell ring. It was a sweet sound indeed.