The Triumph of the Geeks
How a new generation of entrepreneurs upgraded the most important software of all: the company.
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The company promotes Plaid's secure data connectivity, highlighting its use in ChatGPT's personal finance experience. This service provides users with insights grounded in their real accounts and goals. Plaid's technology is showcased as a key component of intelligent finance, giving people control over their data while offering personalized financial guidance.
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Telling the Great American Story, in Print!
The Triumph of the Geeks
How a new generation of entrepreneurs upgraded the most important software of all: the company. By Andrew McAfee.
Today's email is presented by Plaid
People expect financial tools to understand their actual situation. Powered by Plaid's secure data connectivity, ChatGPT's personal finance experience gives people insights grounded in their real accounts, tied to their own goals, and everyday decisions. People stay in control of their data while getting answers built around their real financial life — that's intelligent finance.
At a conference about a decade ago in Silicon Valley, I ran into venture capitalist Steve Jurvetson during a break. “Hey, what’s new?” I asked. He responded with the zeal of a true believer. “Andy, I’ll tell you what’s new. What’s new is that SpaceX is going to bathe the world in cheap internet connectivity via satellite.” As near as I can recall, my response was, “Wow, that is so interesting. I need some more coffee.”
I got away as quickly as I could because Jurvetson’s few sentences had convinced me that he had lost all judgment. He was, after all, telling me about something that surely wasn’t going to happen. I’m no expert on the global aerospace industry, but I knew that it was large and lucrative and populated by well-established, well-capitalized, well-connected companies that had figured out how to do some of the most difficult things we humans have ever accomplished, like launching rockets capable of escaping Earth’s gravity and putting humans into space and then bringing them home safely. I also knew that satellite communications was not a new field. Telstar was launched in 1962.
So my immediate, reflexive reasoning as I fled Jurvetson’s company was something like “If what he’s saying is anywhere near possible, we would be seeing at least some of it already. Some of the incumbents in the industry would already be providing affordable Internet from space, or at least demonstrating that they were on that path. The fact that they’re not tells me that there’s a combination of physics, engineering, and inescapable cost that makes this vision I’m hearing a fantasy.”
The punch line here, of course, is that I am writing this on a laptop connected to the Internet via Starlink. I’m one of the service’s 12 million customers (and growing) around the world, and I’m delighted with it. Jurvetson, it turns out, was exactly right, and I was exactly wrong.
Once I got over my bruised ego, I got to thinking. I’m a business academic. For over 30 years I’ve been studying how technology progress changes the business world, first at Harvard Business School and now at MIT Sloan. In particular, I study how new technologies change the way that companies operate, perform, and compete.
My dismissal of Jurvetson’s spot-on prediction showed me how much I had to learn. From a standing start in 2002, SpaceX had delivered a new and important capability, accomplished marvelous feats of engineering not just in a lab but at orbital scale, and created a large and lucrative global market. While doing so, it made all the incumbents in the aerospace industry look bad at their own game on their own turf.
The Geeks Appear
I didn’t think this kind of breakthrough performance was possible, but it is. And it’s not just SpaceX. Here’s a short litany of other impressive recent accomplishments:
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