Maarten Ectors’ Post

Next session for StartUp To ScaleUp on Tuesday. Have any product or tech issues, just connect and ask... https://lnkd.in/ehvG3nKG

Want to be a billionaire or even one of the first trillionaires? Easy! Read the list of the ten things your next venture can fix…

I have been working with the Cloud for 15 years [2009]. In the early days you only had ephemeral EC2 and S3. While big companies are still migrating from Cobol on mainframe into the Cloud, heavy users are now moving back to private data centres. One worry I have is the actual costs versus the costs reported to executives. Yes, migrating to some shared data centres and paying for the servers and hosting seems a lot cheaper than paying the EC2 bill. However are we comparing apples with apples? How many hours are now spend on configuring low-level OS and hardware issues, are you upgrading firmware when vulnerabilities are detected, are your backups reliable, how fast can you recuperate from disk failure,...? Self-hosting feels like the easy solution but there are lots of hidden costs that IT teams tend to underplay and never report. I think we should go towards more distributed compute instead of less. Why not move away from expensive EC2 to #ZeroCostCompute? We now have billions of zero cost computing everywhere. They are called mobiles, laptops, tablets, desktops,... I am working on a mobile/desktop/tablet browser app which is offline first. Logic is downloaded as WASM containers, the UI is dynamically generated via Flutter RFW [=RemoteWidgets], data is synched via CRDT,... Why? Have you tried connecting to people at busy events with crappy WiFi? To show a client something in an office with bad mobile coverage, complex Guest WiFi setups and badly configured Internet proxies? How much private data is getting hacked each year? What if users deal with their own private data instead? The user experience of loading apps from disk is amazingly fast. It beats any cloud! Instead of making yet another app who people need to download and register for, why not bring many microapps into one app? If this sounds interesting, please reach out, I can use some alpha testers...

I am looking for repetitive and crirical problems you have where you want to open an app or browse a specific website but connectivity is always bad or non-existing at this location. Any such situations come to mind?

If Tesla can produce Optimus Humanoids for $10K cost each, then this will revolutionise many industries. Tesla will be Amazon's, Uber's,... worst competitor because it can mass produce personalised goods in mini robofactories. It can sort out logistics [=robotaxi + humanoid] to get base material. Pick up your fruit, vegetables, meat from farms. Get your clothing picked up, washed and ironed. Make new personalised clothing. Deliver everything Amazon, Uber Eats,... delivers and more. Disrupt Uber's and Amazon's core businesses basically. My money is on Elon becoming the first trillionaire. https://lnkd.in/e3Cc7cdG

Financial Times just published an opinion piece that must be one of the worst articles I read about tokenisation in a long time. Points like "using permissionless blockchains is bad" are completely absurd. What does professor Allen suggest? Use private Cobol systems? That would basically be the status quo. Scaling problems will soon be solved with Ethereum fast becoming the super ledger for fast and cheap tier 2 ledgers. Not being able to trust the code? Well permissionless smart contracts are open source so every hacker can see the code. If code which protects billions is not hacked after years then probably it is more secure than banks ' cobol code. Hands up the bank that wants to publish its code because they think it is so secure it is unhackable? Netting better than atomic settlement???? What if the other party does not pay at the end of the day? Will never happen with atomic. So many holes... https://lnkd.in/e2gTz8BK

With agriculture making up 35% of the EU budget, it is easy to understand why China is retaliating against EV import tariffs by investigating EU agriculture subsidised exports. International business wars are not won with tariffs but through innovation. AI, Web3, robotics,... should be fields where the European well educated population should be all over. It is survival of the fittest in many industries and most EU and US industries are not in great shape. The EU should reduce its 35% agriculture budget to 15% and spend 20% on innovation. https://lnkd.in/emXE-gt2

The Telegraph is always very critical of what the EU is doing. This article gives a good summary of how the EU is caught between a rock and a hard place. The EU is however not to blame. The CEOs of EU car companies are. They must have read the innovator's dilemma in which customers don't want an inferior technology until it improves and crosses an invisible line and now all of a sudden all customers want something that they said they did not want before. This is an MBA classic. People should go back to the interviews of car CEOs in 2018 when they were asked about Tesla. Their responses were arrogant to say the least. Now instead of eating humplepie they will have to fight for survival. There are many industries that are going to be disrupted by innovation, e.g. financial services, farming, manufacturing, energy,... CEOs in these industries should spend 10% of their budgets on investments in technology and business innovation that can disrupt their markets because it is better to be the disruptor than the disrupted. #InnovateOrDie

Want to see exponential laws at work? Solar in 2015 was around 15%, efficiency now it is approaching 35%. In 1977 the price per watt was $76, in 2000 it was around $5, in 2015 around $0.74. We often don't realise how long term trends can create havoc to industries. Soon green energy will effectively cost around zero most days of the year. In a world of "free energy", we can have free heating, cooling, water [desalination and pumping] and as such dramatically increase food production [with dramatic lower pricing as a result]. Most current CEOs focus their efforts on making the next quarters results. They don't assume that their industries could disappear overnight due to AI, exponential cost reductions or other disruptive innovations. The only thing that can save them is their companies being able to launch new product lines very quickly. Most large companies are terrible at this skill. There is only very limited time left to gain these skills. #InnovateOrDie https://lnkd.in/ez5TneU7