I've spent the last few months trying to find my voice so I can help share some stories. Having been in Silicon Valley for decades, having a love hate relationship with it, there are a lot of stories that I can share that hopefully will help you understand the innovators mindsets. What's important? What is their purpose?
I'll start by sharing that a lot of what Silicon Valley is about is problem-solving.
I've spent the last few months trying to find my voice. What does that mean? We all are fairly complex when we're communicating with people. How do we pull from all our experiences, find those things that are important, that give us purpose, and who do we share that with? That’s not always easy, but if one stops for a moment and thinks about it and think about the people you spend time with, are you talking about what's important and where you have purpose? And is that in an area that helps you as you try to move forward in your life?
We have a lot to be thankful for during Thanksgiving. I think a lot of what we do today is emphasize those things that get someone's attention or emphasize those things that get engagement. Advertising drives a lot of that. The news that gets attention tends to be negative. It must be strong and fearful to get attention from someone. We missed the third leg of the stool and that's things we should be thankful and grateful for. There's a lot to consider that gives us hope and promise. But it's sort of gotten shoved aside by these other factors. My attempt to find my voice is really to help people be encouraged to find that innovators mindset. How do you internally innovate? How do you innovate with a team of people? How do you innovate in the organizations that you may be involved with?
I’ve tried to find my voice so I can help share some stories. Having been in Silicon Valley for decades, having a love hate relationship with it, there are a lot of stories that I can share that hopefully will help you understand the innovator's mindset and figure out what is something you want to do something about. What's important? What is their purpose?
I'll start by sharing that a lot of what Silicon Valley is about is problem solving. We typically can innovate in a lot of ways to solve problems. One area I'll share with you is they tend to fall into I don't want to simplify, but two areas. One is improving how we do things. Typically, if you're more on the conservative side, you want to hold on to what you have. You want to be able to improve that position. Then there's those that really go for a step function innovation. I'll give you an example. Having come from in the semiconductor industry I saw that before the semiconductor industry, computers were powered by tubes. They took up a whole floor of a building to do things that you can now do on your smartphone. And along came semiconductors that brought more than a step function improvement but changed everything.
We have innovated to improve how we do things and innovate new ways of doing things. We now have a platform available that connects us in new ways and helps us share technology. To help understand it, you could think of art and technology. Art tends to be right brain; technology tends to be left brain. And those are things that influence those areas that we want to improve, whether it's what we have or what we might build.
My hope as we take a little time off on Thanksgiving, is to consider our own voice as we come to the end of the year and start our following year. And there's things that I am now able to share and do now that I found my voice. The first thing I'll share is how Innovation occurred while finding my voice in a public forum. Doing a number of these episodes is uncomfortable. Who knows how someone's going to view it? But going and stepping out is an important part of the innovator's mindset. And I hope that you find those places you're comfortable, that you know enough about that builds your confidence. You can improve it. Or if you want to get to that step function, go do things that you've not done before, that others might help support you and build your confidence so you might take it to another step forward.
My commitments around this are that as I'm not a young guy anymore, I want to leave a legacy that has both commercial and social impact. I have a 501 C three called Ourmedia (https://ourmedia.org/). Ourmedia was one of the very early communities that was built on the Internet. People wanted to share video, share a podcast. Matter of fact, when YouTube went public, they mentioned Ourmedia. And if you look at how we've evolved around connecting and understanding those social interactions and how we've struggled with it, such as our election, whether it was weaponizing social media or our political system, is being challenged. Our 501 C 3’s purpose is to bring the young generation into the conversation to help them find their voice and to learn from how they want to communicate, tell stories, build narratives that help them build a better democracy that leads to a better future.
The other is called MediaMobz. It's about video storytelling because we get so in depth in the technology and the detail that we forget the art of storytelling and how it engages. to recognize the basic principles of humanity are storytellers from the caveman to the present. So, understanding that art and how that art can help us understand our voice and our purpose and bring technology into a system to better serve us.
That's the primary foundation of what I hope to share as we move forward with a Slice of Silicon Valley. The innovator’s mindset is to build a better future on our terms.
Thank you for joining me. Getting ready to roll into 2023. Hope to see you again soon.