1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital (Part 6)

Sramana Mitra: Talk about areas in which you are looking for companies.

Ashmeet Sidana: There are two recent trends that I have observed and have started talking about. One builds on an old trend that data is the new oil. This is where data is an important commodity that drives businesses like Google, Twitter, and Facebook.

What I have observed is that data is the new oil and data is the new asbestos. In other words, data is toxic and data can kill your company if you are not careful about how you manage it, think about it, and plan for it.

One of the best examples is TikTok. This is a company that is being threatened of being killed simply because of the data that they own. This data is not something that you would think of as special. This is not classified data, technical data, or secret data. This is just data of people dancing.

You would think that this would be innocuous. However, because they have this very large volume of data and we can glean so much information from its metadata, our government is threatened by the data that TikTok owns.

This is a trend that I am seeing in multiple places. I have two companies now which are working in this trend, Concentrix and Robust Intelligence. They are solving the data examination problem. Data is going to be the new asbestos and there are going to be entire companies and categories of companies in this space.

The other trend is one that struck me when I watched the award presentation by Professor John Hennessy who had this observation about the end of Moore’s Law. AI today is compounding and doubling every three months. Moore’s Law has slowed down and is no longer compounding that fast. That is creating enormous pressure in the software stack.

If any of your viewers are interested, I would recommend they look up the lecture by Hennessy to see what he’s talking about. What would be the implications of that over the next five to ten years and therefore where companies will be created.

This goes all the way from new chip companies to where things are in the software stack and how applications will change because of this pressure on the stack.

Sramana Mitra: I have one thought that I want to share with you. We are facing this in the whole Facebook controversy right now. Facebook was built by a young programmer who hasn’t really studied philosophy and hasn’t thought about any philosophical issues because that is not his background.

He has been busy scaling Facebook to world domination with a specific set of KPIs – one of them being engagements which translates into addiction. This is just one example.

We have a ton of engineers and programmers who are building high-impact fabrics of society with no background in philosophy. One of the big questions of our generation is going to be how to merge philosophy with algorithms.

Ashmeet Sidana: You are right. This is one of the most important questions of our time, but let us recognize that this has always been the case with technology back to Plato. Plato was reading technology.

What was the technology that he was against? He said it changed the ways our brains worked and that we should not adopt this technology. The technology that he was against was writing. He didn’t want people to write. He wanted them to think in their minds. It is a fact that when you write, it changes the way you think about things. It changes our behavior in the entire human race.

Homo Sapiens is a great book that talks about the impact that writing has on civilization. The same thing happened with nuclear technology.

Oppenheimer was not a philosopher; he was a physicist. The Manhattan Project was built by physicists and engineers. It had a huge impact on the world. The steam engine was not built by philosophers. Stephenson was also an engineer. Every time you build new technology, we face this challenge. I believe humanity is up to it.

Today, the crucible is Facebook, Twitter, and Google. They are on the vanguard of where this battle will be fought. We have just to decide what we are going to do about it.

We cannot just leave it to these people to decide what is right and wrong. Those are important decisions with social, political, economic, and cultural impact that society is going to have to deal with.

Sramana Mitra: Thank you for your time.

This segment is part 6 in the series : 1Mby1M Virtual Accelerator Investor Forum: With Ashmeet Sidana, Chief Engineer at Engineering Capital
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