The Birth of Bohemian Technologists

In 1862 the artist Paul Cezanne sat on the stairs of the Ecole des Beaux-Arts in Paris in confusion and despair as he read the results of his entrance exam. This man, who many artists and art historians consider the founder of modern art, had just failed his entrance exam to the school, which at the time was considered the only secure way in France of achieving a career as a painter. He certainly didn’t fail because he wasn’t good enough, but because he was too different. Without that diploma a painter became an independent, living a bohemian life of struggle. With a diploma from The Beaux-Art he could gain a patron upon graduation, and live a comfortable life as a painter. There were several things in Cezanne’s favor though, which could have cheered him up that day. Firstly he had been practicing art in a small atelier in Monmartre with three other artists who were also not educated at the Beaux Arts, but who shared a desire to learn, while at the same time break with convention in order to represent the world around them in a unique way. These artists were Monet, Renoir and the mentor figure to them all Camille Pissarro, who at the age of 34 was older and in some ways wiser than the rest. Pissarro had traveled, experienced poverty, but had also experienced that wonderful sense of freedom that comes with having a work of art recognized and appreciated as being of an original vision. Together, and with other similar groups in music and theatre, the art world in Paris was transformed from one which required a formal diploma, to one in which training involved periods of apprenticeship, self-education, friendship of peers and a society that was beginning, like the artist, to see things differently.

Last year I was asked to be a mentor for the Thiel 20 under 20 program, which the entrepreneur and investor Peter Thiel started with a group of highly interesting and intelligent people to challenge the common wisdom of today. This wisdom is not initially about being an artist, but about something we hold as much more obvious, which is the need for engineers and scientists to receive degrees. I admire Peter, and was honored to be asked to be a mentor, but more than anything, I was surprised. I am an entrepreneur, and have been since I was a teenager having started a DJ company, then producing plays and movies, musical events and finally tech companies. That was a long time ago though for many of those efforts, and most people, including myself had forgotten that. By the time I was approached by the Thiel Foundation I had a Ph.D. myself for many years, and was not only a CEO of start-up, but also a Research Professor at Columbia University, one of the oldest Ivy League establishment universities in the country. I had become in some ways the scientific equivalent of the Beaux-Art teacher rather than the bohemian. That is until I thought about it more.  In reality my peers were not just professors, but were hackers, makers and designers with only the smallest amount of formal education. I loved being comfortable in both environments, but was at my best sketching out an idea over coffee, and that wasn’t always at the university. It was often at Starbucks, or on trains and planes. It was sometime in lobbies waiting to pitch a VC who no doubt wouldn’t see my sketch in the same way I would. I worked a lot with my Dad, and still do. He is college educated with a degree in mathmatics, but as he would admit, trained not at school but on the job of building technology companies.

 It was when I accepted to be a mentor that I also accepted that employment as an engineer, scientist and entrepreneur is much like the employment of the impressionists. It was that new realization that not only made me think of the Thiel Foundation and universities differently, but about the possibility of a creative revolution in science and engineering that may now be just starting to occur.

As any of you who have read my writing before know, I am a serious guy about science, and not so impressed with the latest app or social network, no matter how cool it is. That is because it is just cool. Instead I am more interested in enabling major technological changes, which are indeed cool, but also lead to life extension and better health care, better and more reliable power, space travel, efficient urbanization, complimentary Artificial Intelligence and contemporary scalable manufacturing which doesn’t exploit workers but rather challenges and engages them. I have been impressed with the early DIY movements in biology and 3-D printing which I am many others have already written about.The reason though that I talk about 20 under 20, is that I think that the world needs a real, physical atelier of young innovators, who are too impatient to go through the system, but instead want to reach out and try things. This program does this. This is also what I want to accomplish at Nanotronics, the  imaging company that I started (with my Dad by the way). I want to mix Ph.D.s, and seasoned engineers without advanced degrees with creative 19 year olds, knowing that it is likely that the 19 year old will teach the elder doctor as much as the reverse. I also want, as Peter does, to put people together as a group to face this new challenge of not having a guaranteed patron, the way that Pissarro, and others put artists together in 19^th Century France.

The artists I mentioned here were responsible for a lot that we consider important and modern in art. They reduced the reliance on line and traditional perspective. They blurred backgrounds. They used contemporary knowledge of optics to force the viewer to blend colors, creating a complete experience that was different than before. They did this because the Beaux Art didn’t welcome that style, and because they wanted to make a living immediately. Many also didn’t have the resources to wait. Our university system can be much the same. It is expensive and takes a long time to for a student to graduate. This is not to say that I don’t love traditional research and even teaching at a university. I do, and grow from it as I hope my students do as well. It is also terrific and where basic research is done. I also have this feeling however that the impressionists of our time, and the bohemians have the intellectual abilty to innovate in big and important ways don’t have to be from the University. I think that like the advancement of color theory in the 19h century, knowledge of scientific advancements is available to anyone. There are two things that those artists had though that is still rare, that anyone not going through the system must also have. That is a great talent, and a great deal of courage.

Perhaps when we look back at this period in technological innovation Peter Thiel will not be remembered as a founder of Pay Pal or the first investor in Facebook. Instead he will be remembered the way Pissarro is remembered in art.; as an enabler of change.

Innovating The Middle Class

In an interview for our company “Nanotronics Imaging” our new VP Ivan Eliashavich said something ,“15 years ago these ideas could not have been done.” His implication was that time had caught up with some ideas that we had, leading to an invention. In other words ideas often need other ideas to catch up for them to be valuable at all. This is something that is being hotly debated, as the United States is feeling the pain of high unemployment and low worker wages, and the fact that while new technologies may be life improving, they do not pay the bills for most people. Recently Tyler Cowen published an e-book where he claims innovation to be practically dead leading to stagnation in wages and employment. The counter argument to that was made along side his in a great PBS segment. When I wrote a piece about BF Goodrich 2 weeks ago, and how that company ended up employing over 50,000 people (and that was the smallest of the major tire companies) I did realize that the innovation factories of today don’t employee that many. In the PBS piece is was noted that the great social success of Twitter only employees 300 people. The PBS piece did admit to a lag time, where innovation in job creating type businesses may take longer, for instance nanotechology and biotechnology. I do agree with this. But what I am asking myself is whether it really matters that today is different than the industrial revolution, or even the 1950’s, and is there not perhaps a better opportunity that we need to embrace?

I have been a sucker for Michael Moore style nostalgia for 1950’s working class society. I grew up in a town, Akron, which was not so different than Flint. We had people living well, with good retirement plans, who were working class. This is great. What we always considered though was American lifestyle, and not world lifestyle. Suffering internationally was greater then than now. Starvation was prevalent to a greater extent than it is now, and while there were plenty of workers, new technologies were slow to come to market. I do want those days back so that the upper class/lower class gap doesn’t rise, but I don’t think that we can do it in that traditional way, and I don’t think we can do it without the rest of the world being considered. As my father said in a recent interview with me : “International is the new domestic”. In fact when I look at the blog I wrote about BF Goodrich, it wasn’t about those days in the 50’s, but instead about those days much earlier when a business was being born out of an idea, and some risk taking from backers. Right now there is more money available for BF Goodrich type people than ever, even though I do question the patience of those investors. There are also more entrepreneurs than ever. I don’t consider the major companies like Google who only employee 20,000 people to be insignificant, nor do I consider Twitter that only employee 300 minor. Where I do see a problem is that there really is room at the table of middle class employment for everyone when everyone is invited to that table.

This all coincides with Peter Thiel’s assertion that there is an education bubble. He has encouraged students to drop out of college to pursue entrepreneureal ideas. This is very controversial, and like the outlawing of burkas in France, my views on this change nearly daily. There is one part of this that does make sense to me, and that is the enormous amount of technology that exists that is not yet being used for many applications that is waiting for people to take it and do something with, which makes money and employees people. Rubber was that way for BF Goodrich, and hopefully computers and microscopes are that way for Nanotronics. It is tough to say if this will be enough, but it is encouraging. We have not reached this utopia where we have a level playing field, but eventually nationality, and even education will not be a factor, only the ability to connect the pieces of available technology, and find some of that available money to turn it into jobs.