Saket Vora

We woke up, got dressed, and took the bus over to the University of Washington by around 9:30am. The GSEC was being held in their Foster school of business, so we found an empty conference room and took some of the nice food they had setup in the hallways outside the classrooms. We spend the next several hours going through the presentation, assigning slides and rehersing the talk, and making handouts. We found a Kinkos nearby to print and did four full run throughs before go time. We were the first teams to present.

For context: the day before, the 16 invited teams had the first round of presentations. Kari, Will (who both arrived wednesday night) and Naman (arrived thursday at like 1am) presented in the morning. Six teams would advance to the final round.

We gave our 10 minute presentation which went well, and followed by 10 minute question period. The finalist judging panel was five people and they asked very pointed very detailed questions. Kari and Will said that these questions were orders of magnitude over the questiosn they had yesterday. We did our best and watched the five other teams go. It was readily clear that three other groups had truly impressive financial analysis and projections. The Akan Energy team from Cornell was particuarly strong. The last group was Help For Malaria, and Naman was a bit skeptical of some parts of their presentation, the health science side of it anyway. I’m saying this not as a conflict of interest as a competition — I wouldn’t be surprised if Naman is currently considered a world top 50 malaria researcher. He knows his stuff regarding malaria.

Anyway, we were really hungry (skipped lunch) and eventually the bus left to a convention center downtown where they had the awards banquet. The groups milled about outside the dining room for almost a hour before it got underway. I should mention two people here: Duane Dunk was the mentor that we were introduced to via GSEC. He is Director of Drinking Water at HaloSource, a Seattle-based company specializing in point-of-use water purification units. Duane has had experience is so many countries (is taking his 20th or 30th trip to India on Monday!) and is a tremendous resource. He was there the whole week meeting with Joel and our team and providing invaluable feedback. I spoke with him at length that night about point-of-use vs community approaches, difficulties in patent enforcement in the developing world, distribution and sales models, possible partnerships, etc. Amazing guy. Getting to know him is probably the best thing we took away from GSEC. The other is Eric Reed, the UW team ambassador. Eric is a senior in HR at the B-school and was a lot of fun to hang out with and took good care of us while we were there.

The dinner was like the ones for the Park finalist dinner only a bit more nicer. Li Li joined us for this and that’s actually where I got to meet her. A lot of distinguished guests in the audience from Seattle businesses and the UW. They asked all the teams to come up and say something they learned from GSEC. One of the students from the India Institute of Management said that he learned to a) speak slower and b) how to pitch to American investors: use more pictures, fewer numbers. Best line of the night. Bill Clapp, a major figure in microfinance world, gave a keynote address. The “People’s Choice” award for a poster talk given on Monday was given to Help for Malaria. The ‘Investor Award’ for the company most likely to be a real business was Slag Works, a team I’m not familiar with and not one of the finalist teams. The final awards were in two categories: normal and global health. Seeing as two of the six finalists were health related, we knew what might happen.

WaterPLUS took 2nd place in the global health category, while Help for Malaria took 1st. In the normal category, a business plan regarding a sunflower farm to combat poverty won 2nd place, while KAITE, a German-Zimbabwe partnership venture won the grand prize. I thought KAITE had a great chance — they have been going since 2007. KAITE was working with Zimbabwean villagers to create organic products like essential oils and herbs and sell them at a premium in the booming European market. They already have EU Organic certification, pretty cool.

We hung around the hall for a while, meeting other people. I spoke with the President of the Grameen Bank (the microfinance bank started by Muhammed Yunis who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for this). An investor came up to us afterward and told us to keep him up to date on how we are progressing. We also said goodbye to Duane, but we’ll be keeping in contact with him going forward.

We took the chartered bus back to UW and were too tired to go out on the town. It was around 10:30pm this point. We bid Eric adieu at the bus stop and made it back to Li Li’s house, we sat in the living room having tea and just having some really thoughtful conversations. I felt so at ease and comfortable with all of them, despite Naman being the only person I’ve met personally for more than a few days. Tremendous people.

Our flights were scattered, with Will having to leave around 9am, Kari at 12pm, me at 5:45pm, and Naman at 10pm. We ended up heading to sleep around 1:30 or 2am.

I arrived in Seattle much later than I thought, because my flight from San Jose was delayed by 1.5 hours. Fun. I ended up finishing the Piloting Palm book and read several of the EE 418 final report papers.

It was too late for buses when I got in so I just took a cab to Li Li’s house in North Seattle. The team was already asleep when I arrived at 1am…they had a really long day with little sleep. Naman let me in and I finally got to meet Kari, our teammate who is a water resources engineer in public health at UNC. With all the lights off downstairs I didn’t even see her face, but ended up sharing the air mattress with her (with all the requisite jokes coming my way the next day fully expected, hah). I didn’t have a sleeping bag or anything with me in Palo Alto.

Kari called me this morning to let me know that WaterPLUS one of six teams to advance to the final round of the Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition at the University of Washington. Big congrats to Kari, Naman, and Will who pitched the first round today.

I’m heading out the door on the way to the airport. I’ll update later from Seattle.

Here is the video entry for the 2008 Innovation Tournament. Creating value with rubberbands in just 5 days.

Fair warning: it’s never been my intent to be preachy with this website. Just wanted to help communicate more about how I think. Last night, as I couldn’t fall asleep, I saw an article on the Encyclopedia of Life, a project that was E.O. Wilson’s TED prize wish. I started reading about E.O. Wilson and came across this Salon article where he discusses science and religion. It struck a chord with me because it verbalized much of my own beliefs as they stand today.

You can read the whole article here on Salon.com, but a few excerpts below:

Darwin’s own transformation from devout Christian to non-believer obviously raises significant questions in our own time. It raises a very provocative question: If you fully accept the theory of evolution by natural selection, does that logically lead you to atheism?

Well, it does up to the origin of the mind and spirit. And one of the Vatican’s scientific spokesmen, incidentally, just recently turned thumbs down on intelligent design. John Paul II took the position that evolution’s been pretty well proved, and certainly was acceptable as God’s way of creating the diversity of life. But the human soul was injected by God. So that’s a kind of compromise position that a lot of devoutly religious people have taken.

But that begs the question, when did the soul enter? I mean, if you accept evolution, at some point humans evolved out of something that came before. So do all creatures have some kind of soul? Or do only humans have a soul?

Yeah, that’s the dilemma. Of course, there is no reconciliation between the theory of evolution by natural selection and the traditional religious view of the origin of the human mind.

Are you saying we have to choose between science and religion?

Well, you have to choose between the scientific materialist view of the origin of the mind on the one side, and the traditional religious view that the spirit and the mind are independent of the process of evolution and eventually non-corporeal, capable of leaving the body and going elsewhere.

…

What about the sense of awe, of wonder? That’s something you hear about all the time among religious people. And you also hear about it from some scientists as well.

Well, you do. You hear about it from me. Awe is hard to put into words. But it certainly involves a sense of the mightiness and splendor and almost indecipherable intricacy of something greater than ourselves. A lot of religious mysticism arises directly from it. But it’s equally experienced by the secularist whose mind opens to the splendor and intricacy of the material universe.”

…

Would you be comfortable saying that science can have a sacred dimension?

Sacred, yes, in the sense of spirituality. This would be based upon a deeper understanding of just how intricate and surprising the universe is. The story of the origin of life on this planet — the time scale, the magnitude of it, the complexity of how it has been put together — all of that engenders in me even more awe than I ever felt as a devout Southern Baptist growing up.

…

That’s an interesting perspective. Basically, you’re saying it’s necessary but [religion is] wrong.

Well, you see, that’s the dilemma of the 21st century. Possibly the greatest philosophical question of the 21st century is the resolution of religious faith with the growing realization of the very different nature of the material world. You could say that we evolved to accept one truth — the religious instinct — but then discovered another. And having discovered another, what are we to do? You might say it’s just best to go ahead and accept the two worldviews and let them live side by side. I see no other solution. I believe they can use their different worldviews to solve some of the great problems — for example, the environment. But generally speaking, the difficulty in saying they can live side by side is a sectarianism in the world today, and traditional religions can be exclusionary and used to justify violence and war. You just can’t deny that this is a major problem.

…and finally to the part that caught my eye.

Let me follow up on this because I’ve heard you call yourself a deist.

Yeah, I don’t want to be called an atheist.

Why not?

You know, being a good scientist, and having been drawn up short so many times on my own theories and speculations — as all honest scientists are — I don’t want to exclude the possibility of a creative force or deity. I think that would be a mistake to say there is no God or supernatural force. As the theologian Hans Kung once said, how are we to explain there is something and not nothing? Well, that’s a question I’m happy to leave to the astrophysicist — where the laws of the universe came from and what is the meaning of the origin of existence. But I do feel confident that there is no intervention of a deity in the origin of life and humanity.

That is the distinction between theism and deism.

That is the distinction. So I am not a theist, but I’ll be a provisional deist.

To be a deist, you’re saying maybe there was some creator, some presence, that set in motion the laws of the universe.

Maybe. That has not yet been discounted as a hypothesis. That’s why I use the word provisional.

It’s fascinating because everything you’ve said up until now suggests that you should be an atheist. Why hold out the specter that maybe there was some divine presence that got the whole thing going?
Well, because there’s a possibility that a god or gods — I don’t think it would resemble anything of the Judeo-Christian variety — or a super-intelligent force came along and started the universe with a big bang and moved on to the next universe. I can’t discount that.

At this point in my life, that’s pretty much my vein of thought on this issue, which I’ve thought about intently for at least the last eight years. I know, ‘provisional’ sounds like a cop-out, but hey – I can’t claim to know all the answers at just the age 23.

Monday is down. This week is pretty intense…lot’s of things going on. A quick rundown: gave a presentation in neuroscience today, went well. Joel landed in Seattle and has started meeting teams at GSEC. I worked for a while on Sunday formatting and improving the aesthetics of the WaterPLUs presentation.  We got an honorable mention for the William James Foundation competition. Babak and I met to discuss our power amplifier project and later I spent a while at office hours with the TA. A good number of teams are about where we are, so I think its ok. Spent Sunday night filming some scenes for this Imagine It video. Gonna meet tomorrow morning to film more, then hike up on Wednesday morning to film a scene by the Dish. The Palm meeting with Roger McNamee got bumped to Wednesday.

Looks like we’re getting new handsets for Sprint soon. I’ve decided to try a smart(er)phone, and I’m currently looking at the Samsung Ace, HTC Mogul, or the Palm Centro. Once I find some free time I gotta go over to a Sprint store and check them out.

I was greeted today after class by an undergrad doing a survey. I quickly recognized it was the rubberstamped Campus Crusade for Christ. I entertained him for about 10 minutes actually. Poor guy didn’t quite know what to do when I started going off about the finer points of what science says about the Big Bang theory, embryonic stem cell research and the classic ethical thought experience (you have 10 frozen 32-cell embryos in a fridge downstairs and  a 3 month old baby in a crib upstairs; house is on fire and you have time to either get to the fridge or the crib. What do you?), and the degree to which the Bible is inerrant. And he had never heard of Dr. Bart Ehrman before (Chair of Religious Studies at UNC and author of Misquoting Jesus, which I read last year from Peyton), so I told him Ehrman’s biography of an born-again evangelical who attended a religious university and learned all the ancient languages to read the original Word of God, later learning that what we know today as the Bible is certainly not the Word of God, and is now an agnostic. Oh well. At least for him it was probably not the usual exchange he gets.

On a completely unrelated note, I finally found out a way to export my old NCSU e-mail archive (about 10,000 emails) from Thunderbird to text files. After this week or next, I’m going to use this data to do a visualization project using Processing. It’s a good dataset to work with. Not sure how I’m gonna approach it –always open to suggestions.

I’ll post later this week before I take off for Seattle.

Rubber bands. Any number, any size, any color.
Clock’s ticking.

And by exciting, I mean pretty much on steroids. It keeps things interesting anyway. Right now I’m putting together a short (3 slide, limited by prof) presentation for my neuroscience class. I’m presenting on a Nature article from last August that describes the work that Dr. Karl Deisseroth is doing here at Stanford. It’s pretty amazing stuff — cutting edge. Stimulating or suppressing neurons is an extremely important aspect of treating neuropsychiatric diseases. A fairly common procedure these days is the implantation of a deep brain stimulator that periodically shocks a portion of the brain. By doing ’something’ to the neural connections in this area, debilitating tremors in Parkinson’s patients can be suppressed. Anyway, what Deisseroth’s group has done is found a way to cause and suppress neural signals using optical technology. ChR2 and NpHR are two bacterial rhodopsin proteins that are activated when light is shined on them. Using viral vectors to deliver the genes that express these proteins to specific neuronal cell types, these rhodopsins can become present in the neural membrane. Using a small fiber optic cable inserted into the brain, Deisseroth’s group can achieve millisecond scale bi-directional control of how and whether neurons fire or not. This is huge because now an electrode can be used to monitor membrane potentials without being interfered by what usually is the instigating electrode. Amazingly enough, the expression of these rhodopsins do not affect normal cell membrane properties, and the level at which they can perform targeted delivery of these genes is stunning. This presentation is on Monday.

So starting tomorrow is Entrepreneurship Week (http://eweek.stanford.edu) and there is a five day ‘Imagination Tournament‘ that hundreds of students from around the world take part in. The goal: you are given an everyday ordinary product and asked to create the most value out of it. Last year it was a pack of Post-It notes. It was announced in my strategy class that we have to participate in it. Our groups have to put together a 3-minute video of what we do and upload it to YouTube. I could honestly do without the extra work, considering that I’m already a bit behind on my power amplifier project and I’m heading up to Seattle Thursday night for the GSEC competition at the Univ. of Washington. (Oh yeah, I was asked to interview for an Accenture intern position, but the only day they are at campus is next Friday…when I’m in Seattle. Fun!). In another strategy class project, I have a group that is doing a case study on Palm Inc. On Tuesday a partner and I are going to Elevation Capital to meet with Roger McNamee, a principle there and board member for Palm. Also got an interview with a Palm executive in charge of strategic alliances. So that’ll be pretty cool.

My suitemate Luke is hosting a prospective Ph.D student in psychology. Ricardo flew in tonight from NYU, but he’s currently a student at an Italian university. He has dual citizenship in Brazil and Germany. His CV is already pretty amazing…first author on 6 conference proceedings, spoken at 9 conferences, has done research stints at 5 institutions spanning four countries. His subject area is psycholinguistics, and has done work with both adults and with infants. He’s deciding between Stanford, Brown, UPenn, and NYU. I’m hoping he comes here!

Next Sunday after I get back from Seattle the EEP crew arrives in town; I’ll join them for lunch and give them a tour of campus. Jordan will get to catch up with them when they visit Apple. Death Cab tickets go on sale that Sunday too, I hope to get some for their SF show. Things are a going.

My friend Win pointed out that the RSS subscription to this site truncated the posts to just a few lines. I poked around Wordpress a bit and changed the RSS link that is used when subscribing. Use the url: http://www.saketvora.com/feed/

If anyone has other suggestions on how to improve this site, do let me know!

Last quarter I went to a panel discussion that the Computer History museum about the founding of Intel. One of the panelists was Gordon Moore, the engineer whose famous analysis that the number of transistors in a microchip doubles every 18-24 months is known as Moore’s Law.

I was able to snag a photo of him with me and a few friends!

 It was snapped really fast before Moore left the stage.

Bill Gates gave a talk today on “Software, Innovation, Entrepreneurship, and Giving Back” to a full crowd in Memorial Auditorium. A friend and I found a good seat in the upper balcony. It was a good talk that focused a lot of software and how its role in the future. Gates started by showing an extended version of the video they made for his last day at Microsoft. Gates said the transition was going to be interesting for him, as he has been involved daily with Microsoft since he was 17. I’ll note some salient thoughts I took away from the talk. Anything I attribute to Gates is a paraphrase, not to be taken verbatim.

• The ‘2nd Digital Decade’ will result in more transformative changes than the first. Bringing the power of content creation and computation to the masses is a fundamental shift to where PCs first began.
• He has a strong personal interest in natural user interface, such as gestures, MS Surface, etc.
• Microsoft spends $6 billion a year on research, often long term ideas.
• Started research centers in China and India, jokingly saying that if you have a billion people, they’d put a research in your country too.
• The China research center started to deliver quality work much faster than MS initially thought (just ~2 years) whereas the India research center has taken longer. This was because of idea of graduate research work is not well institutionalized in Indian universities.
• It used to be that the mathematics was the language of science, but we’re starting to see computing become the new language of science. Gates showed a video about a collaboration between a Harvard neuroscience professor and Microsoft Research. The human brain would need 1 million petabytes to be stored in harddrives. 1000 terabytes = 1 petabyte, and 1000 gigabytes = 1 terabyte. A 1mm cube of a mouse brain requires 1 petabyte. The professor’s team took this and cut thin slices which were then imaged. Microsoft Research created an innovative viewer which could analyze the layers and using image processing algorithms re-create cortical columns and the 3 dimensional neural circuitry within this. Gates had a live demo of this.
• Gates pointed out that the research that goes into solving baldness versus malaria research is 50 to 1. The majority of R&D and money is spent on marginally improving things for the people that need the least. The marginal value-add for the worlds poorest is significantly higher.
• Pointed remark: “We had social scientists in our research center in India go out to the poorest villages. Even a 10-cent laptop isn’t going to provide the help/change these people need.” Are you listening, OLPC?
• Gates remarked that one thing he wishes every college student could do is to go and see what the daily experience is for most of the world, and it’s not what people go through in America. I’m honestly waiting for the day that a school makes a study abroad trip to a non-firstworld mandatory for graduation.
• Bad governance is a huge problem in developing countries. Gates noted that for health intervention, it isn’t so much of a problem. What is a warlord going to do with 100,000 vials of polio vaccine or 50,000 bed nets? The problem starts creeping in when you start talking about infrastructure, education, etc.
• There is often a total misunderstanding in the 1st world about expectation. A person in Mozambique could go their entire life without ever seeing a real doctor. When people here say “oh well a doctor could intervene” in many places that’s a fantasy. Vaccinations often have be kept cold, which is trivial for 1st worlders, but a real obstacle in the developing world.
• Talent shortage is a huge problem. Africa has 10,000 agricultural scientists, China has 1,000,000. Guess which leads the world is agricultural output? Gates is trying to encourage the 2nd world to start sending talent to the 3rd world too.
• As for what students can do here, Gates offers two things
  • use your power to vote. Compared to the rest of the 1st world, America isn’t as generous. While absolute money is huge, as a percentage it is more stingy that other European countries.
  • the challenges facing the developing world are huge in scope and depth. Pick one area and go deep. Make it something you care about and are passionate about.

Here’s something you notice when Bill Gates talk: you don’t think he’s just using buzz words when he mentions some health program or a disease or a developing country. He speaks with depth that makes you wary of discrediting anything he says. He is a very smart man who has an impressive grasp of knowledge. I for one have tremendous respect for what he plans to do with the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. I hope other successful people adopt the same model. I have a feeling that the good that can come about from the Gates Foundation will top even his incalculable contribution to the modern age.

Just some minor site updates. I fixed the broken links on the Writings page.

I uploaded the WaterPLUS business plan we submitted to the Global Social Entrepreneurship Competition put on by the University of Washington.

I’ve also uploaded the debrief paper and presentation my group put together for the MarkStrat strategy simulation project in my MS&E 270 Strategy in Technology-based companies class. Today’s class was debrief day, and my group was selected to present cause we were the worst performing group in our industry. We got the tongue-in-cheek  “What Happened?” Award. Hehe. It was a good experience. I’m going to be asking the professor to see what it takes to run MarkStrat. I think the first semester EEP track students should do this simulation.

I had written earlier about a green tech talk I attended at the Stanford Graduate School of Business that was sponsored by the MIT/Stanford Venture Lab. Just wanted to let you know that the video of the talk is available online. (free registration for now)

Last quarter I went to a talk that Jimmy Wales (founder of Wikipedia) gave at the Stanford Law School, and that talk is available online too.