Zero to One

Last night Peter Thiel plugged his new book.

It looks amazing!

The lecture was great. TheHackerCIO found Thiel in person to be as stimulating as he is in the many videos available interviewing him, such as on TechCrunch.

I highly recommend getting this book, although I've only made it through the first two chapters.

I think this is the only time I've ever recommended a book without having completed reading it. It's worth reading just for the Preface and Chapter One!

Peter defines technology as "doing more with less." In the lecture he expanded on this, pointing out that we have a big problem with our government at present, because every year it spends more money and get's the same or worse results -- for instance in Education. Which means that government (as it stands at present) is doing less with more. And this was not the case back even in the 1960s. He pointed out in the lecture that we could attack a problem like landing on the Moon back then. We could even declare war on Cancer. Today, no one can or will declare war on Alzheimers. It wouldn't poll well, and couldn't happen. We're unwilling to take on big challenges.

Peter says that "humans are distinguished from other species by our ability to work miracles. We call these miracles *technology*."

Again, get the book. Get it quick. And I'll try to post a more complete review when I've read it fully.

In the meantime, I Remain,

TheHackerCIO

TheHackerCIO is the Universal Man of Technology ... and beyond!

This blog is all over the place. One day it's about Startups. Another, on Strategy. Then it's Clojure, followed by the Java Garbage collector. But it's all about technology. In one way or another. That's because technology is all over the place! In our time, it is the Great Enabler. As well, as the Great Disrupter. And its pace of growth,  rapidity of change, and breadth of spread is truly breathtaking.

Even six or seven years ago, who would have thought that they could with one Git Push command spin up a web-site complete with a database backend and configured, in turn, to spin up possibly thousands of servers to handle a spike in popularity, then shut them down as the spike ended and bill only for the amount used. Yet that is what I saw done in a under a day at a Hackathon a few months ago.

It wasn't that long ago that everyone was impressed with million row tables in a relational database. Now companies routinely process data that makes that seem puny by comparison. Most every reader knows that a Terabyte is a thousand Gigabytes -- soon they'll be getting Terrabyte drives in their laptops. And of course a Petabyte is a thousand Terabytes. And Google processed 24 Petabytes of data every day. Furthermore, that was 4 years ago!

About a decade ago, it was cutting edge to have systems with millions of users. Now, TheHackerCIO has been brought in to architect systems that would scale to hundreds of millions of users!

TheHackerCIO is the Universal Man of Technology. And beyond!  He has to be. Because to rise to the senior level of a CIO, that is, to employ a Karate metaphor, the level of "Grandmaster," one must master many styles, many techniques, many forms. Technology can not be  compartmentalized.

Those who remember their history lessons will recognize this as the renaissance ideal of a "Universal Man." And we are definitely in a revolutionary period. Not the Renaissance revolution of learning; not the Scientific Revolution; not the Industrial Revolution; but the culmination of all these: the Technological Revolution. This revolution is similar in many ways to the revolution of the Renaissance -- we're in a similar growth period today. It's not a rebirth, because it has never been born before. But technology is disrupting every area of business and culture. It's even disrupting itself. How many technology companies have become sleepy backwaters, while free services (i.e., Google, Facebook, Twitter) have overtaken them and become dominant technology innovators?  But that's a topic for another day, another blogging.


So this blog must track all of the dizzying, changing technology. But at least it's fun! And interesting!


I remain, Vertiginously,

TheHackerCIO