Welcome to a Slice of Silicon Valley, Episode 23.
I'm going to talk a little bit today about innovation. When people think of Silicon Valley, two seem to go together, though I would argue, argue that we all innovate every day in different ways, and we'll come back to that. But what I wanted to talk about today is some examples around innovation. This is, by the way, my third attempt at recording this. I use Zoom, and Zoom records it to my computer. But it was having some issues, and therefore this is my third time. So when you think about innovation, there are a couple of things. One, Zoom was very innovative in bringing together an easy way for us to connect and have a video centric conversation. And it as well had to stitch new things together. So when it failed and I was unable to record this, and now my narrative is very different. There's two pieces. One is bringing something new and getting people to adopt as a challenge. When you're forced to, like we were in the pandemic, it accelerates that. When you do that, you have to innovate and how you continually improve your product and you'll see over time, sometimes that's easy, sometimes it isn't. So we're going to talk a little more about innovation. We talked a little earlier about innovating your customer experience. Think of Zoom, and that customer experience was totally changed. And there were some other folks in the market that thought maybe they ought to refocus their efforts around this and have had their own sets of innovations, whether it's teams, webex, Citrix, whatever. You could even take that to some of the streaming companies or webinar companies or virtual event companies. So if you look at how people took something that was known and they remixed it, and they brought a new way of doing that, that's at the core of this, whether it's something that already has done or something that disrupts a market, another way of this is sort of secondary effects. I came out of the semiconductor industry, and one of the things that we used to do in manufacturing semiconductors is use a very toxic acid called sulfuric acid. And my company brought to the market something called plasma removal of the material used to create the image in the semiconductor called photoresist. And sulfuric acid used to be used to remove the photoresist. When we brought a new technique, plasma, it eliminated the need in many cases to use sulfuric acid, which as well required a significant amount of water. And so our customers who were making semiconductors like Intel, Texas Instruments, Samsung, they would look at how much water consumption. So things that eliminated the need for additional water, the things that eliminated the need for toxic chemicals more difficult to manage to dispose of, or things that we're always craving, a place for innovation. So when you think about innovation, it can come from things that we do every day and finding better ways to do it. It can come from things that we have to adapt to, which get to be a lot more complex. We'll come back to that and then it can come from other areas where people are themselves innovating, and you're either drafting on that or helping them solve the problems. So hopefully these three examples as you look at your relationship with your customers and your stakeholders, you think about how you can apply innovation with your teams so you get a robust view of the potential options you have ahead of you to solve those problems. So we'll talk a little more about slices of Silicon Valley and innovation going forward. Thanks for joining us. Take care.