If we compare the capitalism practiced in most of the current developed economies of the World with capitalism practiced in the beginning of the 20th century we can clearly see the achievements of those unionized movements still in place today. People often had to work 12, 14 or even 16 hours per day just to get a miserable salary, while vacations practically didn’t exist. Capital was just as wild as current Chinese 21st century “pro-market-communists” (what a weird combination of words!) where people currently work 12, 14 or 16 hours per day without vacation (!).

If Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels were standing in the same place where Chinese officials built a statue for them in Shanghai, I’m sure they would go crazy :-).

With the statue of Marx and Engels downtown Shanghai

I always thought it strange – almost humiliating, let’s say – to see the statue of a Prussian philosopher and a German-English philosopher in the middle of the “World’s Central State” (China in Chinese) telling them what to do with their destiny (“Couldn’t they figure out by themselves?!?” I wondered).

So now, instead of private-capitalists making slaves out of Chinese people, Chinese Communist Party public-capitalists do it better, and systematically (much more efficient this way). Looks like we are lead to believe that this is the price that Chinese people have to play before they can exercise opinions about their destiny (a kind of “slave first, voice later”).

More non-sense hypocrisy is seen when you visit the headquarters of the Chinese Communist
Party in Beijing and read the founding plaque at the Party:

Sign at the entrance of the Chinese Communist Party founding place: “The founding of the Communist Party of China is the inevitable outcome of the development of China’s modern history”.

You can almost taste a scary Vendetta kind of Chinese movement coming someday, don’t you think? I’m sure the first deep economic problem the Communist Party face, they will evoke this “history” to blame somebody from abroad.

But for me, much more non-sense than all of that Chinese bullshit together is the current debate about right and left-wing parties in Europe (France, Germany, Greece and Spain, for example) and in Latin America (Argentina, Bolivia, etc).

Every time I see a stupid debate between #Sarkozy and #Hollande or between #Rajoy and #Rubalcabar I’m sure they are just playing roles to put people against each other for their own – or their Party’s own – joy or sake. After all, they will all have to play the capitalist game.

Some days ago I saw some flags of the old Soviet Union defending more socialist actions from European governments. I was thinking: “- Are you kidding me? Tell me, who the hell think that a hammer and a sickle still represent European workers these days?!?”

Flag of the Soviet Union

If these leftists Santa-Claus-believers think that socialism or capitalism are still something to debate about these days, at least they should update their flags with something that would make more sense to people in this continent. I even came up with a suggestion to these dinosaurs:

Newton's proposal of a new flag for nostalgic leftists

Should I still explain why I made myself a member of the Green Party?

As computers become indispensable home appliances and internet connections as basic as water or electricity (even in poorer economies), people start exercising different ways to make the difference in this intense exchange of ideas, fighting hypocrisy and irrationality everywhere.

These latest developments in Egypt, triggered by Aliaa Magda Elmahdy (@aliaaelmahdy) in November 2011, for example, made me realize again that we still didn’t fully comprehend the real power of mankind’s increasing interconnectivity.

Aliaa Magda Elmahdy changing the world.

For those of you not aware yet about this case, Aliaa is an Egyptian young elite student, trying to make herself heard through this very “unconventional” way for an Islamic country: showing herself as female human requesting more voice and rights in the new post-Mubarak-dictatorship Egyptian society. She started this spontaneous movement in late 2011. As threats and reprisals against her increase, other Egyptians do the same, taking the focus away from her.

Aliaa and all young men and women following her protest by publishing “unconventional” self-portraits around that region are not only making people around the world to re-think about the role of women in society. They are also showing how Egyptian youths are leading the way towards a less hypocrite and irrational 21st century.

I am sure these young people growing up in current Egypt and neighbor countries will help the world to become a better place when they start assuming responsibilities in the near future. As I heard someone saying this week – probably quoting somebody important: “Only those who lived without freedom realize the price of it, all the others tend to forget its costs”.

And that is the problem with many Western societies these days: having things like freedom for granted is producing a massive number of idiots in these societies, probably incapable to lead anything in the future.

That’s is why I’m also optimist about this current economic crisis befalling over some developed European countries. It’s true it is making some young people simply to runaway to another countries but at the same time it’s making some other young people to question societies and its old practices.

Welcome youth’s critical thinking, from Egypt to Spain, we need you!

Last week, here in Spain, you could see movies on the TV repeating over and over the stories of Moses, Mary, Jesus and all biblical historic-mythological characters that sustain Jewish and Christian religions.

Because of that, I caught myself thinking about how we humans make so much effort to believe in those mythological mind structures. That was how I remembered one of the latest visits to my father in Galicia, in northwestern Spain. He loves geography and geology but spent the last years studying everything he can.

Well, it was during one of those visits that we started talking about Charles Sanders Peirce (1839-1914). Peirce was a chemist and philosopher, “founder” of pragmatism and semiotics, among other amazing philosophical thoughts (Check it out at Wikipedia).

Charles Sanders Peirce in 1859.

According to Peirce, our thoughts mix together stages of belief and skepticism (doubt, questioning). The discomfort of doubt makes us naturally to search for the comfort of belief (his texts are truly works of art, read it for free in here: The Fixation of Belief).

Peirce identified 4 methods in which belief can replace doubt. Three methods were said to be rational methods, methods that depend merely on human reasoning: individual tenacity (trust in one’s established beliefs), authority coercion (an institutionalized kind of “believe or get out of here!”) and a priori (based on pre-existing concepts or fashionable thoughts of one’s era).

The forth method he named the method of experimentation, or the scientific method, where our pre-concepts have little or no influence over the object of belief. According to Peirce, we humans tend to prefer this method of fixing belief, because it allows the testing of hypotheses against demonstrable public observations.

Unfortunately, the scientific method is also developed through the constant and extensive use of the other three rational methods, making it less trustful than we would like it to be. Actually, in my father’s opinion, scientific abstractions, based on things that can’t be found in nature, can be considered as dangerous as religious thoughts if taken without the proper sense of critical reflection.

After all, the concepts behind the number zero, the infinite, the circle, the straight line, the average and all other scientific constants unseen in nature are nothing more than rationalized “scientific” beliefs.

Here is where we reach an interesting “conclusion” point in this mini 3-post debate: if you are the kind of person that believe in God(s) or the kind of person that believe in Science, in fact, you are not so far away from each other as it may appear :-).

Always when I talk about this God issue, some people tell me that I’m dumb because there are many unexplained things around us, and therefore God exists. Well, I definitely believe that there are many unexplained things around us, but what’s the connection between those things and God? I don’t see it. Let’s take just a simple example: the “recent” case of Ram Bahadur Bamjan (the “Buddha Boy”, from Nepal). Discovery Channel could not explain how he can keep alive after being completely immovable for days:

Another constant question: Is it possible that spirits or souls exist? Definitely. Actually, I think that when a person or an animal dies, part of their energies stays present around us and even talk to us or influence us. Can that be called soul? Yes, why not? Spiritism, Voodoo, Yoruba or Candomble are really amazing and powerful things and I do think that they are based on natural phenomena that can be perceived by many of us in different ways but still can’t be explained.

“I’ve got you!” many believers then tell me, “so, you believe in God!”. What the heck! Does that justify the existence of God? Of course not. If God(s) exist(s) just because we can’t explain something, then we are screwed: there is no reason then to look for new discoveries whatsoever. Penicillin? What for? Lets all gonna die at the age of 35 due to a group of stupid bacteria just to make our God(s) (and priests) happier.

Well, why is all of that important to me? Because you can’t understand most of the underdeveloped or developing economies of the world – and be able to dialogue with people living there – if you don’t consider under which social standards or value systems their logic are based on (I’m assuming you were raised in a western developed country).

What motivate their/our efforts? (I include myself here in the group of developing nations) What makes people to start profit-based or non-profit-based ventures there? If you simply rely on the fact that they/we are as capitalist as you, you will be incurring in a tremendous initial mistake. You won’t get their/our trust, and if you don’t get their/our trust you won’t make good business with them/us.

Here I show few superficial differences in starting ventures in emerging economies. Please, remember that these entrepreneurs were raised in the countries they started their ventures and therefore they were embedded in their local social systems. As an out-comer you would have to interpret their realities, something they did more naturally:

“What if I’m wrong?” I prefer using Richard Dawkins’ South Park answer:

I use to say that I am a Christian atheist that doesn’t believe in God. How is that?!? Well, I found out I was a Christian when I lived in India, eleven years ago. India was a breakthrough in my life. I was raise in three types of schools in Rio de Janeiro: first a military school, then a Catholic and then a Jewish. Today, I realize how the three of them tried to make me believe in something.

The military school tried to make me believe that Brazil was a blessed land and we should die for it (we sang the national anthem every day). The Catholic school tried to make me afraid of God and convince me that only He could save my soul (we had to pray every time for forgiveness). The Jewish tried to make me believe that we should live with and protect “our” millenary community, understanding and respecting the traditions (there was symbolisms and get together for everything).

At the end, only in India I saw how deeply immersed in the Christian “way of living” I was. Hell, heaven, sin, forgiveness, an omnipresent God, engagement, marriage, family, saints, temples (churches) everywhere, Christian names, Christian places, etc… All these things are blended in our day-by-day tasks in the Western world (for practical purposes, let’s consider Australia and New Zealand Western worlds too). That is so deeply enrooted on us that we don’t even perceive it.

Indians respected that “limitation of mine”, living under a completely different set of values and beliefs: “Do you have only one God?!?”, some Indians would ask me, “that’s so sad!”. “Do you have only one life?!?”, again, “that’s so sad!”.

Wow! How could I prove to a regular Hindu Indian that we can’t have more than one life? That kharma and dharma don’t exist. Of course I couldn’t. Nobody can.

Indian Gods

I have been reflecting on that ever since and few years ago I decided not to believe in any God, although I still consider myself a Christian cultured, locked in a Weberian Iron Cage, unfortunately limited and mentally constrained by its values and practices (like everybody else that believe in some sort superior being in this planet).

What about you?

During the last day of the visit we moved to San Francisco and had some different workshops with local professors, organizations that support “wanna-be” entrepreneurs and “wanna-be” entrepreneurs themselves. Just to make it clear, I call “wanna-be” entrepreneurs those people who want to get to the stage to be considered entrepreneurs. Those of you who follow my posts know that I just consider “entrepreneurs” people who exercise their theoretical (or Schumpeterian) function in society of finding new – and innovative – ways of trading something. People who are still trying to get there I call them just as “business people”.

San Francisco

In San Francisco we had the opportunity to meet the businessman Brandan Wallace, co-founder of Identified.com, a tool developed to compete with LinkedIn in a more junior – and facebook-like – job market (among other things, they found out that LinkedIn’s demographics achieves much more the senior profiles). Together with Prof. Blake Winchell of IE Business School, partner of Partner Ventures, and investor in the venture, they developed together some thoughts I not only share with them but would like also to debate with you:

1) In the market, usually, most of the people think that the entrepreneur (or the “wanna-be” entrepreneur, under my perspective) is the passionate guardian of the venture while the investor is “barely” the financial-minded part of the formula. In fact, quite often, the situation is the opposite. Think about it: there are a lot of investors out there with pretty much limited resources (let’s say, few millions). If they will put their money in something, they do have to believe in it, be passionate about it.

I met an investor in Brazil once that built his initial “venture capital” by selling part of the company he helped to build throughout some 15+ years of hard work. Me (and the local market – friends, press, etc) estimated he raised some 10 to 20 million dollars in that operation. He was explaining to me that he had only about 10 “shots” in his gun. So, he wanted ideas from IE students to consider investing on them. Imagine the emotional cost for this guy in believing in those 10 ideas. What if none of them worked? His whole fortune would be gone…

2) The myth of the great idea: Most of the “wanna-be” entrepreneurs think that their key contribution to the project is the “wonderful” great idea they had. I tell you something: the idea is not as important as people think. There are A LOT of hard work, appropriate networking connections and accumulation of positive outcomes from business decisions involved before the original idea become something really hot.

With years of accumulated experience, Prof. Blake estimates that nowadays the idea is responsible for about 5% of the success of a venture while proper execution about 95%. I not only strongly agree with him but also think that the tendency is that this proportion will considerably change in favor of execution as ideas become more and more available worldwide. Ideas will only keep relevance when deeply connected to “hard” intellectual property (patents) such as those for new materials.

3) In fact, “pivot” became the magical word of the moment in California. According to the Wiktionary, the word “pivot” comes from the French and Italian word for a very specific tool, usually made of metal, that allow us “to turn something using the same point of support”, like the base that allow the arm of a LP Player to move around (and reach different ideas):

A way of seeing the "famous" pivot

According to this way of thinking, ventures can turn mediocre ideas into billion-dollar companies. To get more information about this interest trend read Eridc Ries book “The Lean Startup”. I have not read yet it sounds interesting.

I had so may other hints from this last day but I do not want to make this post too long. Let’s get back to these issues soon…

Well, after the first – already mentioned – day with visits to Google, Electronic Arts and Symantec, in the next day we had a busy day meeting other members of the Silicon Valley ecosystem. We visited Plug and Play Tech Center, an inspiring incubator-like type of place, designed to support tech ventures in their early stages, check it out.

Visiting Plug and Play Tech Center

They call themselves “Startup Accelerators” or a kind of a “Silicon Valley One Stop Shop”, providing pre-seeding support and eventual partnerships with local Venture Capitalists. In 2010 alone, more than 150 million dollars were raised for some of the 170+ start-ups sharing the space. More than 3,000 business plans apply for a spot in the place in a single year.

Although I liked a lot the whole thing, in my humble opinion – as member of the e-learning “industry”, I think they are still too brick and mortar, promoting countless face-to-face events but very few online activities (it sounds quite contradictory, don’t you think?). In the picture you can see some of the most famous companies that started at Plug and Play: Logitech, PayPal and Google.

Entrance Plug and Play Tech Center

However, the most useful exercise was to listen to some of the founders of ventures currently hosted at Plug and Play: PasswordBank, Userzoom and iCharts. Their insights were really interesting as they explained all the process they had to go through to get to the level they are now, in a positive path.

Summarizing, their hints were:

- Just move to California if you have customers, competitors, investors and would like living in the US;
- Venture Capitalists are increasingly emerging in your home country, take advantage of them and your local network;
- Hire people with experience in small companies, not in big ones;
- In the US hire Americans;
- Don’t show up only with an idea. Ideas worth nothing. Bring a product;
- Clients in the US like to ask for a POC Prove of Concept (click here).
- Start by selling your product first (or gathering users); if you have growing sales/users, that means something;
- Try to hire software engineers in your own country, in the US they are expensive and you will compete with large corporations for talent;
- Try to start B2B before B2C (even if your business is B2C);

Well, I have more notes to share soon. Just would like to show something before. I had the chance to visit the Intel Museum and found this little chip in there, one of the first (material) things that I fell in love (!) in my life: a 386. I know it sounds really geek but I was really dreaming about this little thing when I was 15 years old.

Intel 386

I decided to join the group to see this new “feature” of these programs but also to meet some friends in the Bay Area and to look for activities in the Online Education and the Online Media industries. Almost 50 people formed this nice group of students, all with that ”crazy taste” of diversity that characterize all IE groups. They had some classes on Monday and Tuesday so I joined them on Wednesday, for the first series of visits to companies and players throughout the Silicon Valley. We started by visiting the famous Google Plex (see picture), where we were received by one of the many IE alumni working in the company: Marco Marinucci (International Executive MBA, 2004).

Marco is in Google since 2006 – a long time for the industry standards – and showed us the installations and the history of the Silicon Valley. After that, we got into an important review on the latest trends on mobile advertisement, with the Head of Gomo (Go Mobile). At the end I stayed with some key sentences from this visits: “Innovation is about what’s going to be next”, “Talent + Money + Creativity = Innovation” and “you cannot plan innovation, all you can do is try hard to be in the right place and prepared”.

Newton at Google Plex

But the day was just starting. We still went to EA, previously known as EA Sports. It is an amazing company, now struggling to quickly identify small innovative players to either acquire them or work with them, all over the world. From that visit I got with the sentence: “Videogames = Math + Art”. Where “Art” is the unpredictable variable.

Unfortunately I missed the last visit at Symantec where students were going to discuss about security systems. Overall I considered this first day a great welcoming day to start feeling what was the Silicon Valley about. I confess I knew a lot about it from my previous visit to the region and from many years of studying the subject, but still, it was a great day.

Since Max Weber, I think social scientists pretty much understand already how conventions are naturally established by humans and other animals to gain effectiveness in our actions and use of our brains (we tend to sit in the same seat, follow the same way back home and these kind of things). Take a read on Berger & Luckman’s “The Social Construction of Reality (1966)” for a nice introduction to that subject.

I am talking about a theory that can gather Einstein’s suggestions and combine its consequences with every social aspect of our lives, a theory that can make us to rethink the role of any kind of “constant” social behavior and physical condition.

Let’s think about it: the Earth attracts us to it, just like the Sun attracts the Earth to it. You may not have thought about it but we also attract the Sun and the Earth to ourselves with a tiny force derived from our masses and therefore we also distort space and time by our individual existence just like the Sun or any other mass in rapid movement. I won’t enter into the question about where those gravitational forces come from because then we would get too philosophical (some people believe that gravity is the closest thing we know to God).

In any case, my weird correlation is: just like every mass interact with each other in the universe distorting each other’s physical reality in different degrees, we humans also distort each other’s perceptions on ourselves due to the relativity of all our conventions that are merely based on unreliable and imprecise social definitions and physical evidences that should not be perceived as truth ever (and I think we should have been told that when we were young).

The Persistence of Memory, 1931

Words gain meaning with time, individually to each one of us, changing according to the use we give to them and the experience we have with them over time. I can assure that the meaning of the word “love” for you is different from the meaning it has to me. Moreover, the meaning of the word “love” for you today is different from the meaning you will give to it in 5 years. And even the way the word sounds is affected by the wind and the air chemical composition (like humidity).

The values of gold or money are also just conventions that mean nothing more than some kind of physical representation of certain local social power; especially under this “social game” we have been playing called capitalism. The Incas had a completely different relationship with gold, for example. Besides, the weight of an ounce of gold also varies according to the position you are in the planet since we now know that the force of gravity is not constant around our not-so-rounded Earth.

How about the time? Besides the distortion caused by all other masses surrounding us, our planet and solar system, we now know that not every day lasts a day and not every year lasts a year, so our “sacred” seconds, minutes and hours are all mere simplistic representations of a time that is not so fixed as we wished. Consequence: don’t worry if you arrive a minute late to a meeting. Nobody knows the exact time anyway. :-)

Gosh! Everything seems to be so complex! And I am not saying that in the Parsonian sense of the expression :-) but in a social-physical angle that apparently nobody dared to merge yet. I don’t know why, but Dali’s “Persistence of Memory” came to my mind while I was writing this. Perhaps because I am living in Spain and I do think that the Mediterranean people have been facing these complexities with a pleasant sense of disdain that amuses me. Olé!

Well, I have some news for you: we all are going to die, one day or another. We end up so alienated towards death because we naturally don’t want to die, so we just forget about it. We are not capable to get use to the fact that life and death are just two sides of the same coin. I faced death 3 times in my life and I can assure that if it is quick you won’t even notice.

Today we are here, your eyeballs read these characters in your screen, written by my fingers, and tomorrow maybe your eyeballs or my fingers will be rotting like any lifeless meat would do. Who cares? Some relatives, few friends… It doesn’t really matter actually. Only few things that you did will be left behind: a document, a table, some money, a child perhaps. Still, it doesn’t matter anyway because even the Earth is temporary.

So what is life for? Again, unfortunately, nobody knows. Maybe is to appreciate death? Or maybe just to play with her? I may be sounding too pessimistic, apocalyptical or just non-sense but in fact it is precisely this brevity of life that amuses me every single day. Not like paranoia, but like a strange luck that makes me feel “hungry and foolish” everyday (like the Steve Jobs’ famous “do-what-you-love-to-do” speech, below). After all, learn how to ride a big motorcycle over roads and mountains ahead of you is amazing.