A roundup of the best quotes and highlights from day one of the Innovation Summit.
At CB Insights’ Innovation Summit today, VCs and corporate innovation leads weighed in on everything from where UI will go next, to how the tech investing landscape might change under a new administration, to where VC capital is falling short.
Here’s our roundup of the 20 best quotes and tweets to come out of day one of the summit.
Fireside Chat: Chamath Palihapitiya, Social Capital
The outspoken Silicon Valley investor talked private and public tech stocks, and pulled no punches on the perverse incentives driving many of his VC peers.
“People get promoted for making good decks, not for creating value.”
“Funds that are not founder-driven are the most open and the ones furthest from tech are the most open-minded.”
.@chamath of @socialcapital to room of VCs: VC are “pretty worthless.” They’re there “to get a TechCrunch article” #fightingwords #cbisummit
— Heather Somerville (@heathersomervil) January 11, 2017
Fireside Chat: Scott Kupor, Andreessen Horowitz
The partner at a16z spoke about the recent growth concentrated in private markets, the dearth of tech IPOs, and why tech life cycles are fundamentally at odds with quarterly reports.
On the growing influence of corporate VCs:
“Corporate venture capital has become [important] in the industry and my sense is that it is going to get bigger”
On the market uncertainty under a new administration:
“If the [new government] environment is pro innovation, light from regulation, pro capital formation, I think that’s generally a good thing for technology.”
Kupor explained the downsides that keep tech companies private, along with the consequences for investors and endowments:
“It’s very hard today to be a small cap company in the US public markets…You could in theory go public but you would essentially be orphaned.”
“Empirically more IPO’s mean more job growth … We’ve un-democratized investing in this sector. The people who can afford to invest [in today’s growth in the private markets] are university endowments, or funds, and anyone outside that asset class can’t get access to that growth.”
Panel: Opportunities Unlocked By The IIoT
Executives from the venture arms of GE, Qualcomm, and Cisco broke down the competitive landscape of the Industrial IoT and explained their large acquisitions in the space.
Mike Dolbec of GE said it’s a common misconception that industrial IoT projects are turn-key solutions, and noted that digitizing huge organizations can be a long arc:
“You don’t go with the $100M project first…Digital integration projects are a 10 year journey.” – Mike Dolbec, GE
On the big NXP acquisition, Quinn Li explained how it’s allowed Qualcomm to expand:
“We want to provide sensing solutions to enable autonomous driving, lidars, different sensor technology. Our acquisition of NXP, one of the biggest tech deals, enabled us to become a bigger player in [the] automotive industry.” – Quinn Li, Qualcomm Ventures
Michelle Ash from mining company Barrick Gold shared the company’s perspective as IIoT users, and the challenges that come with harnessing big data in rugged locations using disparate sensors.
“The relatively easy thing is to build apps and smaller solutions. How do we create that overarching brain solution?” – Michelle Ash, Barrick Gold
Big challenge for IIoT, finding intersection between the smallest amount of data needed to drive big data style insights. #CBISummit #IIoT — Kevin Stevens (@kevindstevens) January 11, 2017
Panel: The New User Interface
Lightspeed’s Jeremy Liew talked apps and bots with Twilio’s Arthur Johnson, diving into the future of user interface, voice computing, and why generating lots of data is paramount.
“Consumers will always sacrifice privacy for convenience.” – Jeremy Liew, Lightspeed Venture Partners
“I think customer service is going to be reimagined in the next 2-3 years with this automated bot technology,” – Arthur Johnson, Twilio
Chat will have as many bad ui incarnations as screens. Should not stop us. Remember the hotdog theme on Windows 3.1? #CBISUmmit — Aaron Erickson (@AaronErickson) January 11, 2017
On the subject of better data vs. better algorithms for AI, Liew said:
“More data beats algorithms. More data always wins.” – Liew
The two offered up their visions of how bots will evolve as a platform. Johnson believes human-powered bots will be the first wave:
“Bots that are human assisted are the ones that will have more traction in the near team.” – Johnson
“If I was going to pick a candidate for most likely to develop … a platform to develop a wave of new startups …. chat platforms, AR/VR, or some variation of voice control … I would put my bet on the last of those…[Voice] offers the greatest potential to be the new platform that can generate a new wave of innovation.” – Liew
The first airline that enables “book me a flight to X” on Alexa that actually works wins the industry #CBISUmmit — Aaron Erickson (@AaronErickson) January 11, 2017
“I think we’re seeing a lot of toys right now. But you have to start with something like that because it reduces the expectations of perfection.”-Liew
We’ll have more great quotes coming out of the rest of our panels today and tomorrow. Because:
If you aren’t already a client, sign up for a free trial to learn more about our platform.#CES2017 = what’s now ; #CBIsummit = what’s next
— Jonathan Crowder (@jm_crowd) January 11, 2017