Marcel Salathé’s Blog

Today I'm forty. 

40.

I'm starring at this number in disbelief, even though I've seen it coming for, say, 35 years. It's not because I feel old (I don't). It's not because I can't believe how fast it's gone (I can). 

It's because I can't believe how lucky I've been. I've lived a life of privilege from the day I was born. 

I was born in what is today the world's wealthiest country by almost any measure. I was born to loving parents who supported me in every decision I've made, who didn't pressure me into any particular direction. I was lucky to meet many wonderful friends across the decades and across the continents, some of whom I've only known for a few months or a few years. As far as I can tell, none of them has ever betrayed me. I have a wonderful wife who supported me in all my decisions, who stuck with me in my low times, and who is simply the best partner and mother to our children I can imagine. I have two wonderful children who make me smile every single day. With the exception of the regular childhood sniffles, they have never been seriously ill.

I have never been in a hospital as a patient in the past 40 years. I would love to keep this record going for the next 40 years.

I have a wonderful job, a tenured position in one of the world's best and most innovative universities. I'd like to think I had something to do with this - but it's hard not to see how everything has also simply lined up perfectly: a free educational system, wonderful mentors, perfect timing.

In other words, I was lucky beyond imagination.

I'm curious what's in store for me. Statistically speaking, I'm not even at half time. But ever since I've had children, I've been thinking about death more often. I'm not sure why, but there is something about seeing your children grow up that somehow reminds you that for new life to begin, old life must eventually end. I am now keenly aware that my heart could stop beating tomorrow, or that a car may run me over on my ride to work next week. So what? If anyone reads this after I've passed away, I hope they can see that I've had a wonderful life, and that I've been incredibly grateful for it. 

Perhaps I'll luck out even more, and I will see my children grow up to become independent and responsible adults. Perhaps I will see my wife make her dream come true of becoming a winemaker. Perhaps I can one day hold a grandchild in my arms. I will surely shed a tear then. Perhaps I can work on interesting projects for another two to three decades, and try to make the world a slightly better place than it was before. Perhaps I can see thousands of sunrises while marveling at the beauty of the universe, and my astronomical luck to be among the few bags of atoms that understand where they came from and why they are here. Perhaps I can drink thousands of wonderful bottles of wine, with friends new and old, laughing and crying about whatever it is life has thrown our way.

Perhaps not. Perhaps my luck runs out in a few days, a few months, a few years. So be it. Today, I am simply pausing, after having circled around the sun 40 times, somewhere in a distant corner of the universe, to be grateful for what I've had. 

I was recently asked by a student about advice on what to do, how to plan a career. The student had just completed a degree in biology, but also discovered a love for programming. I wrote a response and decided to publish it here, with very light edits, in the hope it might be helpful for others who find themselves in a similar situation.

The description of your situation very much reminds me of my own, many years ago. So maybe the easiest way for me to give you advice is to tell you how I got out of the confusion at that time.

I became a biology student by the “exclusion principle”. None of my high-school teachers managed to kindle any kind of passion for any kind of subject. For a long time, I thought this was my mistake, that I was just an unexcitable person. Now I know of course that nothing could be further from the truth, and that my biggest challenge these days is to not get too excited about too many things, given that the day only has 24 hours. When it came to deciding what to study, biology simply seemed the least boring. There was something else, too - it seemed the most meaningful. This may sound weird, but in my early twenties, I was in a state of constant, undefined anxiety, about what to do with my life, and the meaning of it all. The only thing that seemed to give me inner peace was to be out in nature, in the woods, or in the mountains. So I ultimately decided to study biology, because that would allow me to spend my professional life out in nature. 

In my second year of studies, I had to take a class called “Evolution, Ecology, and Behavior”. It completely changed my life. First, by introducing me to Darwin’s theory of evolution, which I had heard of, but not grasped with all its implications. It connected my search for meaning and my love for nature in one beautiful idea that is underlying all of life. Second, by showing me that there is a field of biology where one can reason about the big questions of life, using simple math and computers. This was an enormous discovery for me, and to this day, I consider myself first and foremost a theoretical biologist. Indeed, writing “Nature, In Code” was like writing a love letter to this field, the kind of book I wish I had access to when I was younger. 

Despite this discovery, I took a break from university after the second year. I discovered something else that I found just as exciting: the Internet (this was in the late nineties). Not being a programmer, and not having programmed before, I was amazed by the endless possibilities of the Internet, and picked up some basic web coding skills (HTML and JavaScript). I started creating websites, first for friends, then for some businesses. With a high-school friend, I decided to seize the opportunity and start a company, so I quit university. We had a great time, and business was going fine, but after already a year, I realized that I very much missed my just-found true love, the theory of evolution, and I decided to go back to it. Thankfully, we were acquired by another web company in the area that was developing super exciting web tools, and I joined them. This allowed me to work in parallel on both areas of interest, web development and evolutionary biology. I was in heaven. 

Looking back, it’s very obvious to me that these were crucial years. At the company, I learned extremely valuable skills. I learned more coding, more web technologies, and I learned some of the business aspects, too. Most importantly, I learned how to anticipate the future, and how to get some basic working knowledge in domains I knew nothing about. At the university, I learned all about evolutionary biology, but was suddenly in a position where I could use my newly acquired coding skills to do better science. To this day, I benefit tremendously from this experience. And that is why, whenever students ask me if they should join a company, I say yes, especially if it’s a tech company. Even if you later decide that science is where your heart is at, the skills you learn during the time working in tech companies are invaluable.

The world has changed rapidly since then. We now live in a completely digital world, with MOOCs, smartphones, and social networks. It must be overwhelming to grow up in an environment where you have access to absolutely everything, for free. But here’s the catch. You shouldn’t lose sleep over which courses you take, which MOOCs you take, which phones you use, how many followers you have, which schools you went to. In other words, you shouldn’t care so much about what you’re consuming. What you should care about, deeply, is what you’re producing. This view may not be very widespread yet, but it will be. In Silicon Valley and similar innovation clusters, it most certainly is. Any innovative group, team, company I’ve interacted with, it’s the same thing. Your career opportunities will be defined by what you have given, not what you have taken. Put differently, your work is more important than your education credentials. Don't make the mistake thinking that this will only be true later on - it may be even more true at the very early career stage.

As a consequence, I cannot give you any specific advice on industries, research groups, or internships. The advice I would give you is to chose a place where you can start producing, tinkering, expressing yourself. Surround yourself by people who make things. People who put their work out in the open. Creators. Go to meetups, hackathons, coworking spaces, and start contributing. In no time, you’ll find there are more opportunities than you’ve imagined. Try to hang out with people who are smarter than you, and better at whatever it is you want to learn. Intimidation is for fools. If you’re the smartest person in the room, you’re in the wrong room.

If you start building things, your CV will very quickly start to look very impressive. When you learn new coding skills, for example during a MOOC, push your solutions to GitHub. Start working on side projects, and finish them (the latter part cannot be emphasized enough). Even if they seem crappy to you now - you can always go back later and improve on them. This repository of things you’ve done will become much, much more important than your CV. In fact, it will become your CV. Interesting companies and research groups will look at it and love what they see there, because they see that you make things happen, which is really all that matters. But what about the companies and groups that don’t care about that? Easy: ignore them - they are not interesting places anyways.

As a final note, let me just say that I think you are perfectly prepared at this stage for the future, even if you may not feel like it. You have a background in the natural sciences, you really seem to like coding, and you’re not shy to reach out for help when you feel stuck. Honestly, one can’t be in a much better position than that. The world is your oyster. 

Let me close with at least one concrete advice: ask yourself, what would I passionately like to work on during the next 5 - 10 years? It’s good to put yourself in a situation where life may not last much longer after that, to create a sense of urgency. Then ask yourself, where would be the most amazing place to do this kind of work? If you can’t answer the second question, go figure it out - talk to people in the relevant fields, read up on the topic online, go to events. Then, once you’ve found 2 or 3 places that would be amazing, go and ask to join them. If they decline, ask them why, and then go and fix whatever was missing. Keep at it until you are there. 

I hope this is helpful, in some small way, and at some point in time. I wish you all the best.

(This is are the prepared notes for a speech I gave at Lift Basel on October 30, 2015)

Good evening.

It's a great pleasure to be here with you. You are among the brightest and most creative innovators in Europe. We meet at a critical juncture. At stake is the future of Europe. And we, the innovators, entrepreneurs, scientists, activists, and artists, need to step up and take ownership of this future. Because if we don't, Europe will continue its downward trajectory that it's currently on, and become what it many places it already has transformed into - a museum of history.

Let's not fool ourselves - things are not looking too great. We only need to look at the situations in some of the southern European economies. In many countries in Europe, unemployment rates are still above 10%, seven years after the crisis. But what's worse, you can go almost anywhere in Europe and talk to young people, and with a few exceptions, you will hear them pessimistic about the future of Europe. Many would take the opportunity to leave if it came along. The youth unemployment rates are now so staggeringly high that the problem seems unsurmountable. But is it? Let's take a look a the data.

The information and communication technology sector is now the dominant economic driver of growth. Think Apple, Google, Facebook, Amazon, Uber. Noticed something? Not a single European company. Only 1 out of 4 dollars in this sector are made by European companies, and all the indicators for the future are pointing down. Some numbers are even more dire: when you list the top 20 global leaders of internet companies that are public, you know how many are European? Zero. And among all publicly listed companies in the digital economy, 83% are American, and a mere 2% are European. 2%!

There's something that's even more worrisome. Software is eating the world, and all sectors of the economy are being disrupted by software, but the software section is where the predictions for Europe are most dire. This is a real problem. The disruptive process is so fast nowadays, if you are not careful and miss a key technological development, you are basically gone within less than a decade. Remember Nokia? The hotel industry is being disrupted by AirBnB, an american software company. The transportation industry is being disrupted by Uber, an American software company. The Swiss watch industry is now being disrupted by Apple, an American software and hardware company. Again, let the numbers speak for themselves: the 200-500$ segment of Swiss watch sales has collapsed by 20% in the past three months. Other domains where Europe has been strong are now existentially threatened. Volkswagen may not survive the disaster they created for themselves. But already before the Volkswagen scandal, it was clear that the most exciting technology for cars doesn't come from Europe anymore, but from the US; from Tesla, from Google, apparently from Apple, and certainly also from Uber. In the meanwhile, we have the new Volkswagen CEO on the record last month saying that autonomous vehicles are a hype. 

Ok, so some of the old European companies are not nearly moving fast enough. What about the new ones, the upcomers, the startups? Let's look at the top ones, the ones whose valuation is more than 1 Billion dollars - the so-called unicorns. Europe has now 40 of them, and the number is growing, which is good. They have a collective value of 120 Billion dollars, which is also good. But that is still less than half of the value of Facebook alone. Put differently, the value of all European high-value tech companies is less than half of your mum's favorite social network. We clearly have a long way to go. And we need to go much faster - to catch up, and then to take the lead.

So where's the problem? Some say it's VC funding, which is only partially true. Yes, the culture of VC funding is probably less mature in Europe than it is in the US, especially for stage A, B and C funding. But money will find its way into good ideas and market opportunities one way or another. Others say it's simply the European market, and European regulation. I think that is an illusion. Look at AirBnB, the US startup that now has a valuation of over 25 Billion dollars. It was started as a three person startup in California's Y Combinator, but it now gets over half(!) of its revenues from within Europe. And by the way, San Francisco is probably one of the worst regulatory environments you can find yourself in. AirBnB is currently facing huge battles in San Francisco, and a Californian judge recently ruled Uber drivers employees, causing a minor earthquake in the booming sharing economy. Indeed, California is probably one of the most regulated of the American States, and yet it does exceedingly well.

I think that the problem is actually quite simple. But it's harder to fix. It's simply us. We, the people. We, the entrepreneurs. We, the consumers. I have lived in the San Francisco Bay area for more than three years. What's remarkable about the area is not its laws, or its regulations, or its market, or its infrastructure. What's truly remarkable is that almost everyone is building a company in one way or another. Almost everyone wants to be an entrepreneur, or supports them. Almost everyone is busy building the future. Indeed, you can almost physically feel that the environment demands it from you. When someone asks you about what it is you are doing professionally, and you don't respond by saying that you're building a company, they look at you funny, as if to say, "then what the hell are you doing here"?

Needless to say, for entrepreneurs, this is an incredibly exciting and stimulating environment. You are one of them. You are part of the ecosystem. And like most of them, you will often fail in one way or another. But since everyone is failing all the time, it's completely normal. You just keep going, you fail better next time, until that one time when you don't.

It's not a trivial point I think. The other day, I was in Turin in Italy, and I desperately needed a coffee. I walked into the next random coffeeshop, where I was served a heavenly cappuccino, with a chocolate croissant that still makes my mouth wet when I just think about it. Was I just lucky? No - all the coffee shops there are that good. Because the environment demands it. Sure, you can open a low-quality coffee shop in Turin if you want to, but you'll probably have to file for bankruptcy before you have the time to say buongiorno. The environment will simply not accept bad quality. In another domain, I had the same personal experience when I was a postdoc at Stanford. Looking back, all of my best and most cited papers I wrote there. I don't think it's coincidence. Every morning, as I was walking across campus to my office, I could sense the environment demanding that I do the most innovative work - if I didn't, then what the hell was I doing there?

So this is my message to you. I'm asking you to create those environments, both by doing the best and most innovative you can, but also by demanding the same from everyone else around you. These two things go together; they create a virtuous circle. Since everyone knows what doing the best and most innovative work means, allow me to share some thoughts on the latter part - demanding it from everyone else. 

It means that we are not accepting the status quo. It means that we continuously ask ourselves, our collaborators, our co-workers, and our leaders, how we can do better. It means that we put our wallet where our mouth is - that we stop buying products from companies that don't innovate, and that we support those that do. That we embrace technology, quickly adopt new tools, buy from startups. It means that we speak up, in person, on social media, on blogs, etc., when we see conservative, backwards thinking. And let us not be afraid to speak up even when we seem to be alone in our views. In fact, that may be the most important time to speak up. Recall the child, in the emperor's new clothes, who ridiculed the king for not wearing any clothes at all - her initial remarks sparked a chain reaction, with everyone else suddenly feeling comfortable pointing out the obvious.

It also means letting go, and disassociating from people who are not moving forward as fast as you'd like. This may sound harsh, but really, it isn't. In my career as both a scientist and as an entrepreneur, I have seen the painful moments when people realize much too late in the game that they were on the wrong track. You can undo many things in life, but you cannot roll back time. Last year, I started a company with a friend from Stanford, and we got into the famed Y Combinator program. We failed so hard, I can't even begin to describe it. We didn't even get traction. The partners at YC dropped us like a hot potato. At the time, I felt incredibly frustrated - I thought it was their role to help us get on track. But in hindsight, I realized that they were doing us an incredible favor, and letting us fail fast, instead of letting us morph into one of those Zombie startups that end up going nowhere, but suck up all the energy and time of their founders for too long. Time they could spend exploring the next idea. Time they could spend with family and friends.

And this brings me to another point about demanding excellence and innovation. I hope it was clear that I've spoken exclusively about work. I do not for a moment believe that excellence and innovation demand making inhuman sacrifices. They do demand very hard work, dedication, and commitment, for sure. But what do you want to be written on your graveyard? "He created a billion dollar company" or "he was the most wonderful father and friend anyone could imagine"? Ideally both, of course. But you are going to have regrets. Choose them wisely. 

There is also something that we shouldn't do, but unfortunately is a very common European tradition. It's to complain, and wait for politics to step in. To think that if only we had the right political conditions, we would be just like Silicon Valley. Don't get me wrong - there is much that can be improved. Politics can make things harder, and it can make things easier. But it cannot on its own create innovation. It can support it a little bit, and it should. And if you are working in the political sphere, working to make life easier for startups and innovation, I say: all power to you! I support you, I will vote for you. But to the rest of us, I say: just do it. Don't ask for permission, ask for forgiveness if necessary. If you are waiting for permission, you will wait for the rest of your life. Most rules exist for a simple reason: to protect incumbents. Don't ask for permission, just go and do it. 

My final point on this topic is probably the most important one, and it is about you. I strongly believe in role models, and I believe that the only way for Europe out of the current mess is to have strong role models. Role models are absolutely essential. Take a look at Facebook. It's easy to quantify the economic value that Mark Zuckerberg has created through the company. But think about the entire generation of high schoolers and college kids he inspired. Think about all the companies that were, and will be, started by young people who want to be the next Zuckerberg. The next Sergei or Larry. The next Steve Jobs. They were all in their early twenties when they started their companies. I bet the value of simply having these role models - measured by the companies they inspired - approaches or exceeds the value of the companies they themselves created. 

I've had my own share of role models, right here in this very town. I used to work in two software startups -  before they were called startups - that have both gone on to become very successful. The first was called Bidule, which later morphed into Day Software. Its technical founder, David Nüscheler, is perhaps the closest equivalent to Mark Zuckerberg that we have in Switzerland. An ETH dropout, David co-founded the company and brought it to IPO in the year 2000. A decade later it got acquired by Adobe for over a quarter billion dollars. The second company was called obinary, which later turned into Magnolia. In 2003, the two co-founders Pascal Mangold and Boris Kraft realized their company was faltering, and so they decided to take a huge risk and develop a new product which has gone on to do extremely well. They just moved into a brand new building specifically designed for the company, which now employs close to 100 people. 

What these founders have in common is that they were smart, and took a chance when they saw an opportunity. They didn't wait for a more mature VC market, for better political conditions, or for anyone's permission. They just went a built these companies. We need to talk more about them. We need to celebrate them. We need to make sure they want to work here, not anywhere else. Many people who have worked for these two companies have since left and started their own companies. And that's of course how you build a thriving startup environment. Not by government mandate, but by letting smart people innovate, by letting them get back on their feet when they stumble, and by celebrating them when they succeed, because if they do, we all do.

And so we need you to be our role models. We need you to show what's possible, beyond what we believe is possible. It may not be easy, because you may still find yourself in an environment that does not demand innovation - or worse, even in an environment that actively dismisses it. I am here to ask you, please keep going, keep creating the future. When you are being dragged down by the doubters, by the know-it-alls, but the why-do-we-need-thisers, please know that there are many like me, cheering you on, waiting for you to be even more daring. Not everybody gets to be at this podium, not everybody gets the chance to have your attention. But I'm telling you now, we are here, and we need you to pull us into the future.

It is not going to be easy. As George Bernard Shaw so pointedly said: "The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man." Paul Graham, Y Combinator co-founder, advises to "Live in the future, then build what's missing." It is probably the shortest and best recipe of innovation I've ever come across. But living in the future means you will appear a little crazy, and a little arrogant. You are living in the future, after all! And what's worse, many of your contemporaries don't just want to live in the present, they'd prefer to live in the past. The history of humanity is one long fight by those living in the future against those living in the past. To some extent, it is remarkable that we have actually come as far as we have. Every single human invention had to struggle - even things that everyone now takes for granted. From creating timezones to washing our hands between operations, to communicating through phones: Every single human invention that you see around you was once considered stupid, useless, unnecessary, dangerous. But those unreasonable inventors kept going, because they lived in the future, and saw what was missing.

So please, let us all live in the future and build what's missing - here in Europe. I am worried sick that the easiest way for me to live in the future is to buy a ticket to San Francisco. Just like the easiest way for Americans to relive the past is to buy a ticket to Europe, rich in history. I'm asking you to become even more ambitious, more daring, and more demanding, both of yourself, but most importantly also of your environment.

Thank you very much.

"You know, these are the rules".

How often have you heard someone say this? Me, too many times. I have nothing against rules per se. I am certainly not fond of breaking them, even if it is sometimes necessary. But there is one thing that people often forget about rules.

They are manmade.

This sounds trivial, but it is has profound consequences. The most important is that because rules are manmade, they can be changed. People often cite rules as if they were some ancient wisdom, or even natural law. They are not - somebody made them, and it's up to us the change them. If the rules work against you, you must change them. If you can't change them, you are in the wrong system, and you should leave (e.g. your workplace). It's harder if the system is political, and the rules are the law, but it's possible - see this fascinating 16 min talk about voice and exit: 

The second important consequence is that most people may actually disagree with a rule, in which case it might not be enforceable (again, this depends on the context). Think about a rule - any rule. Do you know when it was established? No matter how far back in time the rule was put in place, we now know much more about the world than people did back then. Thus, it's quite possible that the rule doesn't make sense anymore, based on the data we have now. It's for this reason that I have some respect for rules: when they were put in place, they must have made a lot of sense, and we should always assume that there was a good reason back then. At the same time, we should never stop questioning whether the rule makes sense today - and change it if the answer is no.

This brings me to the third consequence: the rule was put in place to defend and protect someone's interest. This may have been the interest of the majority of the public; the interest of a company; the interest of a lobbying group, etc. It may not be your interest. The rule may not be there to make your thrive, and in that case you need to change it.

Steve Jobs, with his uncanny ability to simplify complexity, said it best:

“When you grow up you tend to get told that the world is the way it is and you're life is just to live your life inside the world. Try not to bash into the walls too much. Try to have a nice family life, have fun, save a little money. That's a very limited life. Life can be much broader once you discover one simple fact: Everything around you that you call life was made up by people that were no smarter than you. And you can change it, you can influence it… Once you learn that, you'll never be the same again.”

What a week it's been. You've admitted to the world that you have sold 11 million vehicles that are much more polluting than what you advertised them to be. You've admitted that you've installed software in your cars that specifically detects when a car's emissions are being measured (i.e. the engine is running but the car is not moving) in order to fake the measurements. You've set aside 6.5 billion Euros to deal with this scandal, and have replaced your CEO.

This episode will go down in corporate history as a textbook example of large-scale industrial fraud for a number of reasons. First, there is the fact that the mechanism of deception was software-based. Second, you haven't just duped millions of people into buying a product they would never have bought had they known the truth - in the process, you've contributed to massive pollution that's affecting everyone's health, not just that of your customers. Third, the betrayal of trust is at an unparalleled scale - you've sold polluting machines specifically to a group that's sensitive to environmental issues. Many who bought a VW diesel bought it precisely because they assumed it to be less polluting than the competing products. Fourth, we're not just talking about selling candy - we're talking about products that cost tens of thousands of dollars. In other words, we're talking about tens of billions of dollars of products sold under completely false advertising.

Frankly, it's hard to see how you can come out of this alive. The fines you will have to pay will be in the tens of billions of dollars. The class action law suits will be equally high. Many of your top executives will go to jail. You currently have 30 billion euros in cash reservers, which probably won't even begin to cover your liabilities. And all of this is just the tip of the iceberg. Not only are the 11 million people you lied to less likely to buy another VW in the future, but you've probably also lost everyone else who was considering buying one. As someone who just recently bought at VW diesel - my first VW ever, and almost certainly my last - I can of course only speak for myself. But everyone I've talked to feels pretty much exactly as I do. And if after some more independent analysis, the numbers come back and they are even close to what we currently read in the press (10-40x more pollutants than advertised), I will sell the car immediately even if it is at an almost total loss.

Such a shame. You've spent all this energy over the years and decades to make people like me buy your products. And just as you seem to succeed, the world comes crashing down on you. I feel particularly sorry for the vast majority of your employees who are completely innocent, but who will lose their jobs over this. I feel sorry for every world-class German engineer whose reputation you are dragging down with you, and who doesn't deserve any of it. 

Some cynics say that's just the name of the game. In a couple of weeks, no one will talk about it anymore. They couldn't be more wrong. Every time VW diesel owners start their engines, they will think of how you betrayed them. I've noticed it myself - even though there is less press on the scandal with every passing day, I actually get angrier with every passing day. This is not just a temporary thing. For the first time in my life, I am willing to join groups who take legal action against a company.

But there's hope. As the saying goes, a crisis is a terrible opportunity to waste. 

There is one, and only one reason why I would consider buying a VW in the future: massively beat Tesla at their game. Abandon all fuel-powered development today and invest every single cent into long-range electric cars, and build the electric charging infrastructure throughout Europe and the US (and the rest of the world). In addition, the development of the self-driving car has to be your top priority. The car of the future has no human driver in it, and of course you know this (anyone at VW who doesn't, let go of them immediately). Lobby your government and that of the EU to change regulation that allows for safe self-driving vehicles the day they roll out of your factories. Since you are in an existential crisis, and with you the millions of jobs that indirectly depend on you, they'll listen. 

The strategy can be summarized in two words: batteries & software. Everything else is gone. It may be difficult for some of the more traditional, non-software engineers (like your ex-CEO), to embrace the very thing - software - that brought you down to your knees. But there is simply no alternative. Europe is already lagging behind in the software-powered technological revolution. Aggressively start hiring the most brilliant software engineers away from Tesla, Google, Apple, and Uber to make your new strategy come true. If any resources remain, give them to those universities that are building - or expand existing - world-class software engineering curricula.

So why the title of this post? Because all of this is probably not going to happen. The new CEO, Matthias Müller from Porsche, thinks autonomous vehicles are an unjustifiable hype. I wish I was kidding, but I'm not: the VW board thought that the best person to replace the guy who oversaw the cheating software scandal (or was unaware of it) is a guy who seems to have even less appreciation of the ongoing software revolution. As far as I can tell, now VW CEO Matthias Müller is the only CEO of a large car maker who has gone on record saying that autonomous vehicles are a hype. 

Unless Müller makes a 180 degree turn, it's quite obvious to me that VW is doomed. They may survive as the Foxconn of car making - a pure hardware manufacturer with extremely low margins and mostly terrible, low wage jobs. If that's what they want, they are on the right trajectory. But for Europe, this is extremely bad news, as another major economic player will go down the road of Nokia, and the economy will suffer badly.

I'm currently attending a meeting in Chamonix, France, and one of the questions that was discussed tonight was, what is going to happen to serendipity in the digital age? Serendipity means fortunate happenstance, and some people seemed concerned that the digital age would reduce serendipity, because in their view, it requires real face to face human interaction. I think this argument is weak and perhaps reflective of a certain generation that feels nostalgic for the olden days. But I do agree that serendipity is a good that needs to be preserved in the digital age, and this is no trivial task.

In evolutionary biology, serendipity is captured by the concept of beneficial mutations. DNA, the underlying chemical basis of all life on earth, mutates all the time. Most of these mutations are bad in that they either render a cell inviable, or cause some type of malfuction. Less often, the mutation is neutral - the encoded protein might not change, or change in a way that has no effect. Rarely, but occasionally, the mutation is beneficial, and the new version of the gene is better in the evolutionary sense, i.e. it directly or indirectly contributes to getting itself more successfully copied into future generations.

I would be surprised if the distribution of outcomes in random human interactions were very different. Most interactions are simply not interesting enough to be even started. Imagine the hundreds of people you bump into every week - even if you started a conversation with each single one of these people, you would readily find that most of them are not your type, boring, or just not interesting enough to talk to, beyond polite chit chat. A few people may be interesting enough for you to keep the conversation going for a while, but the relationships will fizzle out after some time. Rarely, but occasionally, you meet a stranger with whom you connect strongly, and they become colleagues, friends, or even lovers. Many years in the future, we will think of the serendipitous moments when we met those people, while conveniently forgetting about all the other interactions the led nowhere.

Can anything more be said about this somewhat vague comparison between genetic mutations and random human interactions? I think so. The interesting question is, how can we optimize the rate of random interactions in a way that ensures that we get the most out of it? Simply more randomness cannot be the answer, and indeed, that's not what we find in nature. In fact, mutation rates are generally extremely low, as low as only 1 mutation per billions of base pairs. But do not think for a moment that the mutation rates in nature are fixed - like everything else, they are subject to natural selection, and they do vary widely both among and -even more so - between species. Viruses, for example, have some of the highest mutation rates among living things (if you grant them the status of being "alive"). The reason for this high mutation rate is that they are constantly attacked by their hosts' immune system, and they need a way to escape from that threat. If they mutate, then the chance of not being discovered can increase substantially. Not mutating is simply not an option, or else the immune system will bring the infection under control before it had a chance to be passed on - an evolutionary dead end. Indeed, the genetic makeup of a population of viruses within a person infected with HIV can change drastically in just a few days.

To bring this back to human interactions - how much serendipity we want often depends on the circumstances in our lives. In moments of great stability, we may not be all that interested in too many random interactions. When we are alone, or looking to expand into new social circles, we may actively connect with as many new people as possible. Professionally, it's probably best to always maintain a relatively high "mutation rate", especially if you work in a fast moving environments (and don't we all these days?).

In the digital age, many of these random interactions occur online. On one hand, since the online community is global, you can now sample from a vastly larger group of people, which may or may not lead to more serendipity. On the other hand, your sample is increasingly driven by algorithms, and in my experience, these algorithms try to predict what I like based on what I already like, which is a kind of targeted serendipity. But there is also the danger that I am getting too much of what I already like, and the true, random encounter with a new person or a new idea becomes increasingly rare. I would love for these algorithms to allow me to fine-tune the level of random interactions.

Ultimately, it is too early to say what the digital age will do to serendipity. My sense is that it will be a good thing, but I guess that's why my friends call me a tech optimist. 

A few days ago, I was watching Apple's unveiling of new products in San Francisco. I've used and loved Apple products for a long time, and these events are always very exciting to me personally. I'm also heading a Digital Epidemiology Lab at EPFL, and whatever is happening in Silicon Valley is of great professional interest to me as well. Increasingly however, when Apple announces new products, I'm not just feeling excitement, but also dread. The dread of realizing that the mobile revolution, which dwarfs both the internet revolution and the PC revolution, occurs completely outside of Europe.

In a few days, I will be able to download a new, much improved operating system onto my Apple Watch. I'm essentially getting a completely new watch, with completely new functionality, for free. I was already amazed by Apple Watch 1.0, but the second iteration sounds just spectacular. There is no reason whatsoever for me to ever buy a watch that is not smart for the rest of my life. I see no reason why any of my children would ever even think about buying a watch that is not smart. And since the smartness of a watch is largely driven by its software, and its ecosystem of services it integrates with, Apple is going to dominate this space thoroughly. Perhaps there will be competition from other players that can challenge Apple's dominance. But whoever those players will be, they will be major software companies (such as Google). In other words, they will not be European.

I'm Swiss, and I have just recently returned to Switzerland after almost a decade in the US. So it's particularly painful to me to see the clear writing on the wall, which is that the watch industry will suffer drastically. Of course, there will always be people who are willing to spend hundreds of thousands of dollars for a beautiful mechanical watch. But this is not a big enough industry to build an economy on. Worse, it's not an exciting industry where innovation will come from. It's not the future.

And the entrance of Apple into the watch business is just one example of a repeating pattern of software companies getting into other markets - markets that were seemingly immune to competition by software - being able to offer a vastly superior product. It's happened before with typewriters and business machines; it's happened before with phones; it's happening now with watches; and it will happen again and again. The phrase "software is eating the world" is now so clichéd, trivial, and true, that you have to wonder why people are still debating it. The question is not if software companies will provide better cars, better drugs, better homes, etc., but when. The only companies that will survive this disruption are the ones that will manage to transform themselves into software companies as well. But time is running out very fast.

What software company is there in Europe to speak of, at the moment (I am not discounting the hopeful possibility that a major one is in the making right now somewhere in a European garage)? Where is Europe's Google, Europe's Apple, Europe's Facebook, Europe's Twitter, Europe's Uber? All we can see are the flames of cars burning in Paris, protesting innovation. All we can read about are Spain's efforts to ban Google News, misunderstanding how the internet works. Remember just a decode ago, when the mobile phone industry was largely a European affair? That's how fast things are moving now, and they will move even faster in the future. The time to feel dread is over. It's time to panic.

There are many smart people in Europe who see this. And they are working like crazy to steer the ship around. Everybody wants to build the next Silicon Valley. Now that it's becoming clear that nobody seems to be able to do that, everybody is trying to build at least some valley (health valley, drone valley, fintech valley, etc.). But how to do that? Marc Andreessen, Netscape founder and tech visionary, argues that de-regulation is a major component. If true, that would be bad news for Europe, which has a hard time with de-regulation. But I'm not entirely sure I'm buying the argument. The US is also a heavily regulated market, and its government is in my experience much more bureaucratic than the Swiss one, for example. In fact, California is probably one of the most regulated, if not the most regulated, of the states in the US. So something else must be going on. That something else is outstanding universities. 

If you look at the distribution of innovation hotspots in the US, there is a very clear correlation with outstanding academic institutions. It turns out that there is more to correlation than just location though. First Round Capital, a leading seed-stage VC firm with investments in Uber, Square, Mint, and others, has recently crunched their data of 10 years of experience. The largest effect of company success was having gone to a top school (Ivy league, Stanford, MIT, Caltech). Even without those data, the connection between innovation and top academic institutions is so obvious that it's completely non-controversial. Indeed, the source of Silicon Valley itself can be found at Stanford University. And this is the area where Europe can move the needle in the right direction relatively quickly.

Europe has a great system of universities, but has in the last century lost its dominance to US institutions. Nevertheless, there are still many European institutions that are at the very top. There should be more. And the way to achieve this is to provide more resources, and to ensure that these resources are allocated smartly (i.e. pick the right leaders who understand the software-driven mobile revolution). The correlation between the ranking and the endowment of a school is striking. Even if you are skeptical about rankings (as you should, since their methodologies are mostly flawed), it's not hard to see that the top schools have huge endowments, and schools with large endowments are more likely to be at the top. While correlation is not causation, recent data from Germany shows that more funds leads to better schools (no one working at a university would object to that - we could all do more and better with more resources).

One very obvious source to obtain more funding is from the wealthy. And by that, I mean pretty much everyone with a university degree in Europe. European Universities are a bargain. You can go to ETH or EPFL, two of the best technical schools in the world, and pay $600 a semester. Yes, you read that correctly. No, there is no zero missing. Other European institutions are even free. And this is as it should be. The one colossally bad idea we should not copy from the US is to raise tuition fees, and to put our students into debt when they want to get an education. The one good idea we absolutely should copy is that once they have received their education, and probably go on to get well-paying jobs, is to ask them to pay it forward to the next generation. Yes, they already pay some of if through taxes, but everyone does. Those of us who have benefited from a virtually free education should, and I think would, pay voluntarily more.

I graduated from the University of Basel in 2002. Since then, I have never been asked to contribute even a single dollar (or rather, Swiss Franc). This is insane. I would very gladly pay a decent amount of money to support my alma mater in its quest to become a world-leading institution. I would love the swag, and I would love to go to events, concerts, soccer games, and network with my peers. What a colossal non-use of potential resources! And it's also the fairest system: it asks us for our contributions at a time in our lives when we can actually afford to make them, unlike the system that asks us to pay tuition fees when we are essentially broke teenagers.

So please, European universities, stop playing in the second league when it comes to fundraising. Go out and ask your alumni for resources to help you build the next Stanford. Because the next Stanford will give rise to the next Google, the next Apple, and the next Uber, ensuring that we are the ones who are doing the eating, rather than being eaten. 

Starting on August 1, 2015, I will begin my new position as Associate Professor at EPFL in Switzerland. This post is a reflection of this transition.

I'm incredibly excited about the opportunity at EPFL, for a number of reasons. First, it is an excellent research university (don't take it from me). Second, unlike many other european institutions, they are very enthusiastic about the potential of online education, as evidenced by their Center for Digital Education, dozens of MOOCs, and close to a million online students. They were also the first European partner of Coursera, pretty much immediately after it launched. Since I share the enthusiasm about the potential of online education, this is a very exciting environment for me. Third, they have created a great environment for startups over the years, and the Lausanne / Geneva area, where EPFL is located, now takes in the majority of VC funding in Switzerland. 

In addition to many other reasons, I'm also really excited to be back in the Swiss research environment. The Swiss, a small population in a landlocked nation without any natural resources to speak of, are well aware that education is their best bet to compete in a global economy, and correspondingly invest heavily on research and development (about 2.3% of GDP per capita, which is the 12th highest percentage internationally). In return, the results are impressive: output it terms of papers per capita is off the charts, and they win more scientific prizes per capita than most anyone else. These may not be most useful metrics, but they are at least to some extent indicative of a productive scientific environment. In addition, it's very exciting for me to be closer to some institutions that I've enjoyed visiting in the past few years, most notably the Institute for Scientific Interchange in Turin, Italy, where I will be a fellow next year. 

But before you get the wrong impression: I'm very sad to leave the US. I have had a wonderful time here, first as a postdoc at Stanford, and later as a faculty member at the Center for Infectious Disease Dynamics at Penn State. The "can do" attitude at these places is just phenomenal. It's no wonder that US institutions so thoroughly dominate the scientific enterprise. Professionally, I will try to be as American as I possibly can, by which I mean maintaining the fast-moving, risk-taking, stand-up-and-try-again, pioneering attitude that is so pervasive here. 

As much as I hope to bring that American spirit to my new European home, I am equally hopeful - but somewhat pessimistic - that US institutions will adopt a more European approach about access to higher education. I have never felt comfortable working at an institution that charges hundreds of thousands of dollars for an education. It's impossible to blame a single factor here, and there is obviously huge variance on both sides of the pond. But it's a relatively new phenomenon in the US, which is why I will observe the developments in Europe with heightened sensitivity. What's remarkable about the situation is that I haven't met a single person at any US institution who has individually thought that this is a good development. Everyone agrees that it's bad, and yet the ball keeps rolling in the wrong direction. The reason why I remain hopeful is that the US is highly adaptable, and those years that I've spent here are strong evidence of that (a black president, the health insurance reform, the gay marriage decision, etc.). 

Personally, I have had an absolutely fantastic time, and I will always remember it fondly. Actually, I can't quite believe I'm leaving. I'll miss the people, I'll miss the landscapes, I'll miss the open space (sooooooo much space), and I'll miss the attitude. But then again, I have much to look forward to. 

So long!

This is my attempt to make a final attempt at blogging.

I've blogged on and off since around the year 2000, but have never managed to stick with one platform. For the past few years, I've greatly enjoyed Twitter as a micro-blogging outlet, but for some longer thoughts, it doesn't fit well.

After many attempts with different platforms, this is my attempt to make it final. Posthaven seems like a perfect solution for what I'm looking for. It's a simple platform, and promises to stick around for ever. It's not made by people who want to get rich(er), and you pay for it, ensuring long-term financial stability without ads. And the only reason why I believe all of this is because it has been created by Garry Tan. Of all the partners at Y Combinator that I had the chance to meet during my time there in 2014, he was by far the smartest, most creative, and most relaxed (a rare combination anywhere). If he puts his name on the pledge, then I'm buying.

I'll transfer this to salathe.com as soon as possible. (done)