Today, the average life expectancy in the U.S. is 78 years.  It’s a remarkable achievement in light of the fact that the average life expectancy during the 18th and 19th centuries was less than 50 years old.  Innovations in medical treatment, food production, and hygiene standards have all played a key role. However, the celebration of a longer average life span has been met with a sobering reality about the quality of those later years.   There is a general acceptance that most of us will experience memory loss as a natural part of the aging process. Memory loss seems to start around the age of 55 years old, and it’s a subtle condition that most of us will barely notice.  Memory Loss can be the precursor to various forms of dementia, including Alzheimer’s Disease.  Currently, there is no effective medical treatment for memory loss. But there is a body of published research about how certain lifestyle choices will promote general good health and restrict memory loss.  Today’s discussion is about the causes of memory loss and what you can do to prevent the onset or slow its progression.

Game Changers Silicon Valley

6 Ways to Respond to Memory Loss, Prevent Dementia

Professional sports face a number of common challenges starting with developing a winning team as well as maintaining brand value within the community and with ticket buyers. While Loyalty, community support, and financial viability are easier with a winning team, in today's connected world, every venue is vying for the attention of the consumer. On a completely separate path, the Smart City movement has defined its mission as bringing the benefits of the digital revolution to city services.  Local and regional governments have picked up this trend and are incorporating the latest digital technologies into their infrastructure projects. There is a confluence where these two forces are becoming partners to improve the deliver a compelling engagement for those attending the sports or entertainment event.  The Irish economic planners have identified the Smart City movement as a space where they can be a leading user and provider of technology solutions. Today I have three guests representing both the government and the private sector who will discuss the strategy to create and deploy technology for the Smart Stadium. My guests are David Brody, Vice President, IDA Ireland, Professor Noel O’Connor, CEO at the Centre for Data Analytics, Dublin City University, and Pat Dempsey, Strategic Projects Director at the Centre for Data Analytics. This podcast addresses the following topics: The current state of technology research and development taking place in Ireland today. The Smart Stadium project as part of the Smart City movement. What defines a Smart Stadium? What technologies are utilized in a Smart Stadium? What type of government-corporate partnerships participate in a Smart Stadium project? How do the data scientists participate in the Smart Stadium? 

Smart Stadiums Play by Different Rules

The media spends most of their time in the “happy part of Silicon Valley”, with stories about companies that were successfully funded, grew and acquired. The exit or sale of the company sounds like a naturally occurring event, but the effort to sell a startup company is incredibly demanding and the fact is:  there are very few public forums that talk about the challenges, strategies, and effort required.  This podcast is Part 2 of Companies are Bought not Sold, and explores the strategies a startup company can execute to create a leadership profile corporate buyers will find attractive.

Part 2: Companies are Bought not Sold

All entrepreneurs need an exit plan, an opportunity to see their company, generally through an acquisition with an established corporation. The difficult question is knowing when to sell, the terms of the sale and finding the right acquisition partner.  This podcast challenges that assumption.  It’s actually the buyer who is controlling the decision to acquire and the terms of the transaction. Part 1 of this podcast explores the sequence of events for a Founder and CEO to take his venture-backed company to an exit.   We start with a board meeting, where Ken, the Founder, and CEO is informed that a decision has been made to bring in an experienced manager to be the new CEO and take the company to the next level.      

Companies are Bought, not Sold, Part 1

Every city or metropolitan area desires to emulate the startup ecosystem using the Silicon Valley model. However, the success of Silicon Valley did not happen overnight.  Building out that ecosystem took a ramp of approximately 20 years along with the engagement and belief of many talented people.   Nonetheless, every major metropolitan area is facing the challenge of facilitating the development of a start-up ecosystem or seeing their most promising companies and talented human resources move to other cities where an active start-up ecosystem does exist.  This podcast will look into the development of the startup ecosystem in the State of Texas and how this movement leveraged the unique resources within large cities as well as smaller communities.  

Igniting a Startup Ecosystem

The depth and breadth of the Agtech movement are transforming many agriculture sectors.   The dairy industry is a well-established industry that has received some productivity enhancements over the years. such as automated milking machines.  Otherwise, the products and methods have remained the same over the decades and centuries. The dairy sector is now going through a transformation in Ireland.  Private industry and the government are making a move to apply 21st-century innovation and productivity enhancements to transform the entire dairy supply chain along with the products that are being produced. Join me with Maeve Crowley, Vice President of IDA Ireland and Mark Keane, Chair of the Computer Science department at University College, Dublin and a Director at the Vista Milk Research Institute as they discuss the innovation taking place in the production of milk.

The Future of Milk

 The startup ecosystem continues to create new products and services that contribute to our productivity and quality of life.  The participating parties including research and intellectual property from universities, programs for entrepreneurs,  technologists and an established set of service providers from startup accelerators to a range of outsourcing services for everything a startup company needs to grow efficiently.   A key driver to allow these components to produce results is the startup investor class and within that class, the provider of seed capital.  The first outside capital contribution is incredibly important giving the startup validation and working capital to continue their mission.  Today, we see a range of seed capital providers from the angel investor community and specific seed funds from the venture capital community. Finding the Right Seed Investor As an entrepreneur, if you have a lineage coming from several years at a brand name IPO, or you are part of the founder team with a track record of successful exits, then you have the basis to shop your company’s financing needs to venture capital funds and angel investor groups.   If you are first time entrepreneurs with no track record in the startup world, then you are likely to find the most receptive investor audience within the angel investor community.  The angel investor community is not a single type of investor.  There are unique aspects and preference to each angel investor and angel investor group.   The podcast is about the mind and heart of the angel investor as Jonathan Wu, Vice President of the Sand Hill Angels, sits down to give us his perspective on seed funding, how entrepreneurs gain traction with angel investors, and avoidable mistakes entrepreneurs make.  Jonathan also provides insight into the type of mentorship an angel investor can make including his own experiences in helping startup companies to accelerate their growth.

Finding the Seed Investor for your Startup with with Jonathan Wu and Jim Connor

 On Monday of last week, Capital One announced a data breach affecting an estimated 106 million Credit card customers and applicants. This is one of the largest Data breaches experienced by a large bank.  One noteworthy point is that this cyber theft was conducted against data stored in the cloud-hosted by Amazon Web Services.  In the past, most cyber intrusions have been conducted against a corporate data center.  Capital One is just one of the many companies that have migrated to cloud services technology to improve performance, deliver software enhancements, and reduce costs by closing down dedicated data centers.  But, the heightened complexity and interdependency of applications deployed in the cloud has also introduced some new exposures and vulnerabilities. While attending the RSA conference in San Francisco this year, I had an opportunity to meet with John Dickson of the Denim Group.  John explained how the migration to the cloud-based infrastructure is a completely new concept verses, how apps were developed five years ago.  He also discusses the approach used to create cloud applications known as continuous integration, continuous deployment, or CICD.  The sheer complexity of the many moving parts in this technology can lead to simple missteps in security, leading to a data breach.

The Cloud Hack at Capital One

This conversation is with Jamie Rhodes, founder of the Central Texas Angel Network, an active angel investor group, based in Austin, TX.  The startup story begins with an accelerator hosted by Texas State University and supported by a group of local mentors and advisors.   One of the companies gaining traction in the accelerator was SioTeX.  The company ’s Intellectual property which had been funded and developed by Texas State University was a new method to convert rice hulls, which are a waste product, through a proprietary process to create a high-grade organic compound called Silica. After the initial round of startup funding, the company began to work on commercializing the production of Silica for Paints and Coatings manufacturers.  Silica is used in the production of paint.  As the sales and marketing process engaged with the paint manufacturers in the U.S., there was “little or no response”.  Eventually, the company learned from these prospective customers, that their product did not meet the specifications required by the paint manufacturers. At this point, two years after the initial funding, the company faced a clear dilemma.  They were low on cash and had not found traction in the primary market as defined by the original team. And just one more issue, the CEO had decided to leave the company and pursue some other interest. The dilemma for the investors was:  Is it time to walk away or put more money into the company on the hope that a viable market fit would be found.  In other words, the investors had to decide if it was time to hold ‘em and invest more money or time to fold ‘em, and walk away and let the company fold from insolvency. Join me with our guest, Jamie Rhodes, who was an early mentor to the company, invested in the company and was on the Board of Directors.  The other board members and the shareholders convinced Jamie that he was the best person to take over the role of the CEO and hopefully turn the company around.

Texas Hold 'em for the Angel Investor

According to a United Nations study by the year 2050, the world’s population will reach 9.1 billion which is 34 percent higher than today. In order to feed this larger, more urban, and richer population, food production must increase by 70 percent. So the question is given the limits of available farmland and water resources, how are we going to meet this increase in food demand? Agtech Sector Perspective from Roger Royse, Founder Royse Law Firm: Agtech is not just a movement it’s a revolution. We’ve had an industrial revolution we had an information revolution learn an agricultural revolution right now and as agriculture becomes a tech-enabled business and we’re seeing that come up in a lot of different areas robotics artificial intelligent controlled environment soil health as we were talking about earlier. So the thing that’s been driving all that. Are a couple of things in my world here in Silicon Valley. It’s really been the fact that the venture community woke up to this like I say about six or seven or maybe eight years ago and started investing heavily in this. On Vertical Farming, Sonia Lo, CEO of Crop One Holdings  Vertical farming is as the name implies a stacked shelving system generally within an enclosed space with artificial lighting but probably the simpler way to think about vertical farming is that it is the transfer of electrons to calories or the storage of electrons to calories because energy is the single largest input and what that really implies is that for the first time ever really agriculture can be segregated from climate and geography. And so anywhere you can generate an electron you can grow food. This type of vertical farming, that’s very dense, that can be liberated from climate and geography is something that’s a relatively recent phenomenon in the last six to seven years. And that’s been enabled by the advent of cheap LCD lighting and cheap sensors. The unit economics of indoor growing of food has really been enabled by the cost decline and those two input technologies.

Agtech, the Last Frontier, with Sonia Lo, Roger Royse and Jim Connor

We hear a great deal of discussion about protecting access to our digital assets, bank accounts, travel services, retail sites and even government agencies like the IRS and State Tax Authorities.  The recommendations focus on creating a secure name and password, two-factor authentication and possibly a biometric verification such as a fingerprint or voice print. During the RSA conference in San Francisco, I came across another source of digital identity theft, easily overlooked and there is was, staring me in the face one morning when I checked my name on a “financial aggregation” web site.  These are sites that collect information about each of us and then sell that information to anyone, anyone who will attest with an online click that they will only use the information in an authorized procedure, such as qualifying for benefits, or employment verification.  As part of the podcast series on cybersecurity issues, I met with a company that specialized in providing identity verification to financial companies in their online registrations.  The conversation with Dean Nicholls from Jumio provided insights into the methods used to create false digital identities and the technology to detect and deny the creation of these digital identities.

Who is Protecting Your Digital Identity

What are your options if you have a real business but there is a lack of engagement from venture capital?  In 2015, Congress implemented Title IV of the Jobs Act, which was intended to provide a process for startup companies to sell stock to the general public while remaining a private company.    Why haven’t you hear about this process, knows as a Reg A+?  The provisions of Reg A+ allow a company to raise up to 50 million, but there are compliance regulations, audits, SEC-mandated disclosures.  But the opportunity to sell stock to the public and create an investor base for funding future growth expands the opportunities for the startup community to develop new sources for funding. My guest on this topic is William Santana Li, the Founder, and CEO of Knightscope, a company that provides autonomous robots for security services.  When Bill was not able to secure venture capital funding, he decided to use the Reg A+ process for a mini-IPO.  In this podcast, Bill will lay out the process, the motivations, the surprises and the due diligence he encountered.

Disrupting Venture Capital

Many of the best entrepreneurs have leveraged their corporate experience, contacts, and resources to create new products and deploy a business strategy that was verified while they were corporate managers.  Despite having that extensive background in product development and innovation, the life of the founders in any startup is a never-ending roller coaster ride that can easily derail valid ideas, strategies and market needs. The Knightscope story is personal, compelling and demonstrates just how challenging the process of developing a viable and sustainable business can be.

Logic and Passion in building an Autonomous Security Company

As I scanned the list of my unread emails, one stood out, coming from alerts@citibank.com. The message indicated there was a problem with a credit card transaction, a link was provided to learn more about this problem.  I clicked on the link and was taken to an official-looking Citibank web page with a form to login to my account. Fortunately, I did catch myself before completing the login, realizing that this was a classic phishing attack to trick me into providing my login credentials on a fake web page. According to a 2019 Report by PhishLabs, approximately 65% of all phishing attacks were part of a credential theft scheme. The article claims Nation-state actors use phishing attacks to gain strategic access to target environments, such as the armed forces, all areas of the federal government, the power grid, corporate research and virtually all areas of intellectual property. Join me and Colin Bastablé as we discuss the various types of cyber attacks and how Lucy Security helps organizations defend against these attacks.

Recognizing Phishing and Cyber Attacks

Studio software and computer vision have empowered the adoption of virtual characters and virtual movie sets.  The next logical question was: why are we limited to actual human voices in the dialogue?  The emergence of AI is powering a new approach to analyzing voices, identifying and tagging speaking patterns by age, sex, education, cultural heritage, and accent to fix audio tracks in movies.  This podcast discusses the Company’s technology to create a synthesized voice that is designed to fit the character in a movie, animation or audio dialogue. The challenge in a movie is casting actors who have both the image and voice to convincingly fit into the story’s setting, whether it is in space, on another planet in the future, at a historical time such as the civil war, or even a prehistoric time. Well, this is not just any simulated audio, this is the ability to create a voice that reflects a specific age, sex, education, profession all within a specific cultural background, complete with a regional accent.

Using AI to Create Any Voice with Ron Weissman, Zohaib Ahmed, Jim Connor

Our mission is to provide you with the stories about innovation taking place today that may be the Game Changers of tomorrow. We invite entrepreneurs, investors, researchers, and scientists who will share their successes and failures.

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Game Changers Silicon Valley

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