Medical Robotics, Virtual Society and The Path to Success
Hello and hope you have had a wonderful week. As usual, here are my top five picks for this week featuring: a podcast with a forward-thinking founder, a quote from an aviation pioneer, an interview with Steve Jobs' right-hand woman, a book about the metaverse and a documentary on a record-breaking athlete.
Enjoy!
PODCAST
Magic Leap Founder Rony Abovitz is a serial tech entrepreneur and visionary. He co-founded Mako Surgical in 2004 — a robotics company specialising in manufacturing surgical robotic arm assistance technology utilised by hospitals worldwide. MAKO was acquired by Stryker Corporation in 2013 for $1.65 billion. Listen here or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Rony went on to found Magic Leap — a spatial computing company which envisaged a futuristic world, many years ahead of its time. Starting out of his garage in 2010, Rony worked on Magic Leap at night whilst still working at Mako during the day. He partnered with award-winning Weta Workshop in New Zealand and assembled a world-class team of creative scientists before building their own high-tech factory in the US. He remained Magic Leap’s CEO until 2020 when he helped recruit Peggy Johnson to be his successor. Rony remains on the Board of Directors at Magic Leap and is also founder and CEO of Sun and Thunder – which incubates creative tech experiments. He is also strategic advisor to Lamina1, the Layer-1 blockchain for the Open Metaverse co-founded by none other than Neal Stephenson - who famously coined the term “metaverse” in his book, Snow Crash. Listen here or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
Rony is also working on another startup which we weren’t able to talk about but I am looking forward to having him back on the podcast next year to discuss it.
Listen here or wherever you listen to your podcasts.
I also enjoyed this podcast episode where Lex Fridman interviews Andrej Karpathy.
QUOTE
INTERVIEW
Joanna Hoffman was Steve Job's right-hand woman for many years, both at Apple and at NeXT.
Whilst attending a lecture at Xerox PARC, Hoffman met computer designer Jef Raskin and got into a conversation about, "What computers should look like and how they should improve people's lives." Raskin was so impressed with Hoffman that he asked her to interview for a position at Apple and she began on his Macintosh project in October 1980 as part of Raskin's initial team which consisted of Burrell Smith, Bud Tribble, and Brian Howard. At the time she began, the Mac was still a research project and her role was basically to be the entire Macintosh marketing team for the first year and a half of the project, which included Product Marketing collaboration on the Mac product design itself. She also wrote the first draft of the Macintosh User Interface Guidelines. Hoffman would eventually run the International Marketing Team which brought the Mac to Europe and Asia, and she later followed Steve Jobs to NeXT, as one of its original members.
Later, during the early 1990s, Hoffman was vice president of Marketing at General Magic, (listen to Macintosh and General Magic creator Andy Hertzfeld (on Joanna’s right in pic above) talk about those days on the podcast here.)
Watch the interview here. #ShareHerStory
And here is Joanna talking about the Mac back in 1985.
BOOK
Virtual Society: The Metaverse and the New Frontiers of Human Experience by Herman Narula.
What is the metaverse? Is it a brave new world or an immersive digital playground? The next generation of online gaming or just the latest manifestation of our human tendency to create other realities?
Improbable and MSquared founder Herman Narula argues that it is all of these things. His vision of the metaverse, deeply rooted in history and psychology, looks to the Egyptians, whose conception of death inspired them to build the pyramids, to modern-day sports fans whose fantasy leagues are as competitive as the real thing, and finds that humanity has always sought to supplement our day-to-day lives with a rich diversity of alternative immersive experiences.
Rigorously researched, passionately argued, and written by a tech founder and creator of digital worlds, Virtual Society reveals why the metaverse offers a new universe of ideas that offers users unprecedented opportunities to create, explore and find meaning. It's an essential guide for anyone who wants to get beyond superficial headlines and understand the true shape of our virtual future.
Buy the book here.
FILM
"Everybody should believe in their own capability." Eliud Kipchoge
I have always seen a great connection between founders and elite athletes, and this documentary highlights this - the overcoming of obstacles, ignoring the naysayers, have a singular focus, grit and persistence. Executive produced by Ridley Scott and Kevin Macdonald, KIPCHOGE: The Last Milestone is a cinematic portrait of world record marathon holder Eliud Kipchoge as he prepares to break one of the last milestones in sporting history: the sub-two hour marathon. It follows his journey from his training grounds in Kenya, to the high-tech facilities in Europe, to his record attempt in Vienna. His lifelong motto: no human is limited.
I know I have shared this documentary before (last year) but I think it is worth noting for any new subscribers and even encouraging a re-watch if you have already seen it, especially considering Eliud just made history again when he broke the marathon world record by 30 seconds, running the Berlin 26.2 mile course in 2:01:09. That record just made him, officially, the greatest marathon runner of all time.
Watch the inspiring documentary here.
And then watch a recent interview Eliud did with Dr. Rangan Chatterjee here. "You cannot sit and wait for success."
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I hope you enjoyed this week's newsletter and were able to draw some inspiration from it. And thank you, as always, for listening to the podcast.
Until next time...
Danielle