Technology has been a big
part of my life since I first visited the Museum of Holography in New York
City during a high school field trip in 1981. From that moment I
knew my life would somehow be connected to technology, I just didn't know exactly
how. As it turned out, I didn’t enjoy engineering curriculum in
college and ended up moving into sales and marketing in my early
twenties, but my interest in technology was never far in
the background, and in the mid 80’s I got involved with a pioneering
company called LA Holographics. The company ultimately failed, but it did
fuel my passion for physics, and it also contributed to pop culture as the
creative catalyst for the “Holodeck” in Star Trek, The Next Generation,
which came about through my involvement with a Paramount Pictures recreational
softball team. The team’s
pitcher, Peter Lauritson, happened to be a producer on the show, and
he took interest in my perhaps over zealous explanation of holographic
concepts, and he and his writers worked some of the ideas we talked about into
the show’s storyline, exercising an appropriate, if aggressive, amount of
Hollywood style creative license.
Many years later I had the
privilege of joining an exciting early stage start up company in LA,
EarthLink Network, during the early wild west days of the Internet. I
fell in love with the fast paced environments of the high tech world, and went
on to start or join several early stage Internet-related companies, some of
which failed, but several of which became significant successes. The
most defining start up experience of my early career was my time at Idealab’s GoTo.com, which is one of the
inspirations for this story. As described in this book, Idealab was
one of the first startup incubators, and while it has produced several
successful companies over the past fifteen years, none have been more impactful
than GoTo.com. This company was
based on the crazy, and to some, offensive, idea of including
sponsored content, or advertisements, within Internet search
result pages, brazenly crossing the religious barrier between
advertising and editorial content. As with most revolutionary ideas, no
one saw this coming, but GoTo's improbable business model went on to fuel
a huge percentage of the internet advertising economy (as high as 60% in the
early 2000s, and today ~40%), generating many trillions of dollars in economic
value since first introduced in 1998. Notably, this estimated total
value includes Google's revenue, because in grand tech industry
tradition, Google imitated GoTo’s innovation of placing paid search
advertisements adjacent to search results, and that model now powers over 90%
of Google's revenues. This incident led to an intellectual property infringement
legal battle that was ultimately settled for ~200 million shares of
Google stock, creating well over $1B in value for Yahoo—clearly the bargain of
the century for Google if you consider the settlement amount is
a small fraction of Google’s ~50B in annual revenue produced on the
back of GoTo.com’s improbable business model. It’s
interesting to note that Google is using some of that money to invest in
quantum computing research and development, so in a very real sense, GoTo.com will become a founding
godfather of quantum computing.
Though most of my time is
spent on the front lines of the Internet economy, my passion for physics
has always remained strong, and I’ve followed industry developments with
great interest. After all, quantum and theoretical physics is
the point of the spear in humanity’s ongoing push to understand where we
come from, where we’re going, and how and why we’re here. How’s that, you
may ask? Quantum science is the purest attempt at understanding the
fundamental building blocks of all that
is; the very essence of our physical universe. Paradoxically, this
incredible journey towards understanding the building blocks of the physical
universe leads us into a very unphysical world—the world of general
relativity, special relativity, dark matter, black holes, string
theory, quarks, quantum entanglement and, one of my personal
favorites, quantum superposition, which basically states that a quantum
object can be in any and all of it’s potential states/positions at once.
If true, does that mean I can be late for work and early at the same
time? Or does it mean that this reality is just one of many
realities unfolding around us in parallel—the idea of parallel universes?
Another incredible concept in
quantum physics is the observer effect, which basically states that an
experiment can be impacted by the very act of observing the
experiment. Put differently, quantum theory states that particles exist
in a state of uncertainty until they are "observed,” which implies that
observers—us—help define the universe around us by the very act of
observing it. Talk about creating your own reality!
Perhaps my favorite idea in
all of quantum physics is
called quantum entanglement. This scientifically proven
phenomenon, that baffled Einstein himself, holds that two related particles (a
pair of electrons or other kinds of relationships) can be separated by
thousands of miles or thousands of light
years, and if you stimulate one, the other will react. This suggests that
distance in space may be an illusion, and that all things are ultimately
connected.
If you think these
concepts seem to cross into spiritual or metaphysical realms, I couldn’t
agree more, but I bet they’d call smartphones “metaphysical" a hundred
years ago. That’s why science is so compelling—it shines the bright
light of knowledge and understanding on the dark, mysterious and unknown,
advancing the human condition along the way.
While these ideas demonstrate
the remarkable amount of scientific and technological progress we’ve made
over the past hundred years, we still have a lot to learn. But I'm
incredibly excited about being alive at this moment in time because we’re in
the midst of the most incredible period of knowledge advancement in human history.
Our understanding of the universe around us is accelerating at unprecedented
rates, and science is leading the way. Consider where we’ve come from in
the last century, where the very ideas of inventions like TV, telephones, cell
phones, computers, X-rays, Einstein’s Theory of General Relativity, airplane
flight, space flight, antibiotics, nuclear power or the internet would be
rejected as pure madness. So, what will the next century
bring? Based on progress in quantum physics alone, the future looks
breathtaking. Several companies—including Google—along with universities
and governments are actively developing quantum computers, so it’s a matter of
when, not if, they’ll be in mainstream production—probably within a
decade. When quantum computers finally arrive, they will
exponentially increase computational speeds, which is at the heart of our
ability to drive better scientific progress, because faster computational
speeds drive faster experimentation, allowing us to accelerate the test, learn,
iterate process—the very engine of the Scientific Method. This
virtuous cycle will inevitably lead to rapid advancements across almost every
field of research, impacting every aspect of civilization, from medical
research around managing DNA sequences, to Artificial Intelligence, which,
depending on your point of view, could yet again profoundly accelerate human
advancement, or lead to our demise. Either way, we’re in for one hell of
an exciting ride.
This book is a product of my
passion for innovation, startup companies and quantum physics. The
idea for the story hit me while on a morning run near Mammoth Lakes,
California, and I had one of those “you have to do this” moments—a message
that certainly didn’t arrive with a lot of information about how I would
get it done, how long it would take, or how challenging the process would
be. I don’t know if the inspiration came from a parallel universe,
a practical joker version of my future self, or just appeared out of the
thin mountain air, but I felt compelled to act on it and see it
through to completion.
I want to make clear that the
opinions communicated in this book are mine and mine alone, although I've
inevitably modeled some of the character attributes in this story after
people I’ve come across during my many travels and adventures. I’ve
included Idealab and Bill Gross as central figures in this book because it
connects the story to my life in ways that are meaningful to me, and Mr. Gross
graciously, if reluctantly, agreed to let me use his name and Idealab in the
story. None of the ideas or opinions conveyed in this book are
his. However, let there be no mistake, GoTo.com and the profoundly
innovative and impactful paid search business model are his inventions.
I hope this story has been a
source of enjoyment for you, and I also hope it's sparked an interest in
science, quantum physics or the incredibly exciting and dynamic world of high
tech innovation and startups. And, finally, I hope you share my
sense of profound optimism for the future. We are on a grand adventure
that will ultimately lead to understanding the mysteries and secrets behind all
that is. Yes, we're in for one hell of a ride, indeed.
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