Whats the benefit of being the 100,000th person working on something? The 3 Best Books on Self-Reflection and Introspection. Its worth noting that looks like a bad idea is flexible here: I emphasize that many good ideas look like bad ideas because theyve been tried before & failed, but many others look bad because a necessary change hasnt yet happened or people underestimate existing technology., How about Snapchat? Its not the consequence that makes a problem important, it is that you have a reasonable attack. Are we running out of oil and gas? Many of these models may require transients much too long to be practical in a well test, but may be quite effective for analysis of production data (Fig. Do you have the capital to start a VC fund of your own, and throw multi-million-dollar investments at every social media until finally in 2010 you knew for sure that Facebook was the winning ticket and could cash out in the IPO? Kuchuk, F.J., and Ayestaran, L.: Analysis of Simultaneously Measured Pressure and Sandface Flow Rate in Transient Well Testing, paper SPE 12177, prepared for presentation at the 1983 SPE Annual Technical Conference and Exhibition, 58 October, San Francisco. Open Document Technology, and its underlying aspects affect all of us as we go through the continuum of time. Err 1. Without the funds for the fuel companies, we couldnt have flown anyway. Freds luck held again. The auditor who went through the companys books concluded that it was entirely solventwhich isnt surprising, when you consider that the lands it owned in America now produce trillions of dollars in economic value. One could also say the same thing of China: countless European observers forecast that China was a sleeping giant which, once it industrialized & modernized, would again be a global power. The flowmeter did have a place in transient testing, though, but during drawdown, not buildup. An additional analogy from reinforcement learning is PSRL, which handles more complex problems by committing to a strategy and following it until the end and either success/failure. That old failed idea might be ready for prime time. We won't always understand God's timing, so we have to trust that it is best for us. Indeed, the U. S. Department of Transportation estimates that V2V technology may eliminate or reduce the impact of up to 80 percent of crashes involving unimpaired drivers. The tremendous development in technology and the diversity in this industry have drastically changed the lifestyle of people in society. Though not venture backed, Southwest Airlines was cofounded in 1967 by Herb Kelleher and of course has gone on to become a very successful business. As I waited somewhat nervously to give my first technical presentation in 1975, several papers were introduced with an anecdote about the speakers experiences 25 years before. Put simply, it's not the time lead or the technology; it's what a firm does with its time lead and . Vacuum tube technology was first exploited for high-speed digital computing in Britain during the Second World War [16]. I told him he was right, but that pressure data were quite noisy, that the analytical solutions were differentiable, but surely not real, data. Similarly, Mark Zuckerberg was not the first and only Zuckerberg, he was the last Zuckerberg; many people made social networking fortunes before himmaybe Orkut didnt make its Google inventor a fortune, but you can bet that MySpaces DeWolfe and Anderson did well. 2 I asked Fred where the funds had come from, and he responded, The meeting with the General Dynamics board was a bust and I knew we needed money for Monday, so I took a plane to Las Vegas and won $114,135.9$27,000.01973. I said, You mean you took our last $21,136.3$5,000.01973how could you do that? He shrugged his shoulders and said, What difference did it make? Home robotics will have increased just as you believedkeikaku doori!yet your index fund gone bankrupt (reindex when one of the robotics companies collapses? I was expecting smartphones to take off in mid 2004 and was disappointed over and over again. Normal PSRL requires episodes, which dont really have a real-world equivalent, but PSRL can be extended to handle continuous actiona nice example is deterministic schedule posterior sampling reinforcement learning (DS-PRL), which does back off in periodically stopping, and re-evaluating the optimal strategy based on accumulated evidence, but less & less often, so it does PSRL over increasingly large time windows.. Secrets of Sand Hill Road: Venture Capital and How to Get It, by Scott Kupor 2019 (a16z), excerpts, In a strange way, sometimes familiarity can breed contemptand conversely, the distance from the problem that comes from having a completely different professional background might actually make one a better founder. My PhD adviser at Stanford was Professor Henry J. Ramey Jr., one of the all-time giants in reservoir engineering, and especially in well testing. The question constantly asked of anyone who claims to know a better way (as futurologists implicitly do): If youre so smart, why arent you rich? The lesson I draw is: it is not enough to predict the future, one has to get the timing right to not be ruined, and then execute, and then get lucky in a myriad ways. Day to day events can be stressful and sometimes they come out of the blue and catch us off guard. previous similar startups failed). Yet, it took until the mid-00s for the promise of smartphones to materialize overnight, as it were, a success which went primarily to latecomers Apple and Google, cutting out the previously highly-successful Nokia, never mind visionaries like General Magic. We often joke at a16z that there is a tendency to fight the last battle in an area in which one has long-standing professional exposure; the scars from previous mistakes run too deep and can make it harder for one to develop creative ways to address the business problem at hand. So you dont know the timing well enough to reliably launch. Balakrishnan and B V Sreekantan. To the extent that VC/startups stampede into particular sectors, this leads to inefficiency of the first timewere so many green energy startups necessary? IBM and Apple both went nearly bankrupt at points, and Microsofts stock has been flat since 1999 or whenever (translating to huge real losses and opportunity costs to long-term holders of it). A successful company rewrites history and its precursors14; history must be lived forward, progressing to an obscure destination, but we always recall it backwards as progressing towards the clarity of the present. It was not much but it came at a critical time and kept us in business for another week. What has changed since then is, no doubt, some improvements in the mathematics, but largely, I think wed all agree, better compute power and a lot more data. Richard Hamming describes ripe time as finally enabling attacks on consequential problems22 Edward Boyden describes the development of both optogenetics & expansion microscopy as failure rebooting, revisiting (failed) past ideas which may now be workable in the light of progress in other areas23. If people dont want to go to the ball game, how are you going to stop them? as Yogi Berra asked.) One thing that. If so, you might spend some of your hypothetical money on whatever the best approximation to a robotics index fund you can find, as the best of a bunch of bad choices. The greater part of a century had to elapse before the vacuum tube arrived on the scene. However, when I arrived back in Memphis on Monday morning, much to my surprise, the bank balance stood at nearly $135,272.2$32,000.01973. A further application of criterion 4 arises if theoretical infeasibility is demonstratedBut it is well to look on such negative proofs with caution. There were people playing around with controlling brain cells with light going back to the 1940s. Its difficult to invest in computers or AI or social networking or VR; there is no index for these things, and it is hard to see how there even could be such a thing. Every Monday, they required Federal Express to prepay for the anticipated weekly usage of jet fuel. Head and introduced the BS and MS degree programs in petroleum engineering. ], Investing in Good Ideas That Look Like Bad Ideas, Networks of Power: Electrification in Western. reflection-in-action. It's frustrating to desire somethinga solution, position, experience, relationship, or possessionbut sense the Lord saying "no" or "not now.". Is this impossibly rare? What do the curves say? Yet they all seemed to be independently aiming for the same archetypal design. Even the women and children of the common people know that the unicorn is a favorable portent. Early PC history is rife with examples of the prescient failing. In their book Edisons Electric Light: Biography of an Invention, Robert Friedel, Paul Israel, and Bernard Finn list 23 inventors of incandescent bulbs prior to Edison. Future research on the equifinal configurations we proposebroad/nonselective for early movers and narrow/selective for late moverscould thus help resolve the debate about the link between timing and performance. stfu and watch for those who watching rn alam ko na pinagagawa din kayo ng sir/mam nyo nga ganito hahahahah : Custom Type-Curve Generation for Pressure Transient Analysis of Elongated Linear Flow Systems,, Moran, J.H., and Finklea, E.E. If you think about the spectrum of things in which you could invest, there are good ideas that look like good ideas. Today, I am not really a proponent of type-curve matching per se, but rather with using the derivative response to recognize flow regimes.13 We now can use data processing originally designed for convolution or deconvolution of downhole pressure and flow-rate data for analysis of production data.14 This approach is particularly effective in wells with permanent gauges. This sounds a good deal like individuals pursuing standard careers & occasionally exploring unusual strategies like a startup; they will occasionally explore strategies which have performed badly (ie. This presents a conflict between personal and social incentives. During a recession and a cleantech backlash. When interviewed many years later about why, despite being a lawyer by training, he was the natural founder for an airline business, Kelleher quipped: I knew nothing about airlines, which I think made me eminently qualified to start one, because what we tried to do at Southwest was get away from the traditional way that airlines had done business.. A major benefit of R&D, then, is in laying fallow until the ripe time when they can be immediately exploited in previously-unpredictable ways; applied R&D or VC strategies should focus on maintaining diversity of investments, while continuing to flexibly revisit previous failures which forecasts indicate may have reached ripe time. . 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