Patrick Collison

Address Part Three

VI. Education

1. Computers in Schools

And on a slightly broader scale, or just a little bit more long-term, I was also trying to think about what distinguishes Ireland from the US, how we could improve things here.  And I think one pretty big thing that it would be great to see changed is just education and in particular secondary education.  Computers in schools right now is pretty terrible.  I mean, even though there’s a reasonable amount of it, I think, it tends to be kind of vocational training in Word and Excel and all the rest.  And I mean, Word and Excel are certainly useful skills to know, I mean, it’s good to know how to use them, but it’s not teaching you computers themselves.  It’s just teaching you specific applications.  And so what I think we really need to do is introduce programming into schools.  Programming is going to be the, well is and is going to be more so, the maths of the 21^st century.  And the sooner we realise that fact the better.  I think, I mean, programming is going to become the fourth R, you know, as in those three Rs.  I mean, if you allow writing as one of the Rs you have to allow programming.  Steve Jobs has this great quote which kind of aptly describes the power of how computers can extend the power of thought.  And that’s basically that –  humans are quite slow as land animals go in terms of running, I mean we can be outrun by so many different creatures.  But a human on a bicycle can beat anything.  And so, by analogy, computers are bicycles for the mind.  And I think this expresses it well. 

2. Leverage

In the same way that the printing press increased the leverage of individual person, who could then go and, instead of just distributing a couple of dozen pamphlets, could go and influence a couple of thousand, or tens of thousands of people, computers increase the leverage of one individual person.  I don’t know of anything that’s as simultaneously creative and yet constructivist and challenging and open-ended and all the rest.  One small example of this is, last Christmas, while we were involved with all these acquisition negotiations, I needed something to keep my mind off things and stop myself going mad. I’d also been travelling a lot, and because of that, been without access to the Internet.  And when I was deprived of access to the Internet, I didn’t have access to Wikipedia, and I realised how little I really knew.  I mean, with no Wikipedia there I was stuck.  So I decided to write this application for my phone that allowed me to store a complete copy of Wikipedia on it.  And this is no huge technical achievement or anything, I mean, just taking the copies, or the database dumps that Wikipedia provide and just putting it onto a phone and putting a little reader on top of it. 

3. $100 Laptop

I enjoyed it and it was a fun project to work on for a couple of weeks.  Then, in something like March of this year, do you know the $100 laptop project?  The $100 laptop, basically, is this project that came out of MIT, where they want to bridge this digital divide, and provide inexpensive, robust laptops to developing countries.  And so, one of the members of that organisation contacted me in March and said they’re interested in porting this Wikipedia application to the OLPC, which is their laptop.  And so they took the code I wrote for my phone and ported it to this laptop.  So now the current batch of something like 100,000 laptops going to Peru, I think it is, now includes a Spanish version of this Wikipedia application, so that those kids without Internet access can have access to the entirety of the Spanish Wikipedia. 

4. Labs

And as I say again, the creation of this Wikipedia application was no big accomplishment, but the kind of leverage that programming gave me in that instance is quite indicative of the experience in general.  And I can’t think of many other things that allow you to influence so many people in such a straightforward manner.  So, yeah, I really think this is something that’d be worth changing.  I was speaking at Sligo IT last night, and on the car on the way in I was speaking to one of the lecturers, and he was saying how, I mean, we were talking about this thing, it was like how programming is so engaging and all the rest.  And he said that actually they’re running into that at the moment, whereby a lot of the students are complaining that the labs close at 10 o’clock and they get really engrossed in some problem they want to stay there. 

5. Story

And that reminds me of a story from one of our investors, one of the guys from Y Combinator, who tells the story of how when he was in high school, it was kind of the days when there might be… the computer in their school might have been the only computer in a five­mile radius.  And so they, himself and his friends were really into programming it, and I think they eventually set it up so they could access it remotely, and then one night it crashed.  And so, obviously waiting until nine o’clock in the morning was not an option, so there’s some story whereby they climbed up on the roof and found a panel on the roof they could open, made their way down into the bowels of the school, found the server and eventually restarted it.  But again, this is not particularly unusual as programming goes. 

6. Public Speaking

The other thing that I think would be worth changing in education, and I mean this comes from just me thinking back to, I don’t know, experiences of the last year and a half or something, things that I was pretty bad at and would be nice to have had a bit more of a head start on.  A big one is public speaking.  I really think that public speaking should be reintroduced to schools.  I mean, this was something that was painfully evident to me back over the past year or two years.  It was something I really sucked at, and still kind of do.  So I think it would be great if – the difference that a good public speaker makes is huge, just like the ability to express yourself and  display some sort of confidence in getting your ideas across is really important and makes a big, big difference to people.

7. Founding a Company

OK, so I’ve talked a little bit about how Ireland should change or whatever and all these sort of big, grand notions.  But the other question that I tend to get quite a bit is just tangibly if someone is thinking of starting a company, or just thinks that they may be interested in it or just kind of wondering in general what the whole process is like, what you should do or who you should talk to or what you should read.  And that question is actually much simpler to answer.  There is one book called Founders at Work which is a collection of, I think it is 30 interviews with founders of companies that went on to become extremely successful.  But all the interviews investigate the period, like, the genesis of the company, back when no success was in any way assured.  And for that reason it’s really powerful.  I mean, you’ve stuff like an interview with Steve Wozniak, who’s one of the founders of Apple.  And he’s discussing the stage where he was just building Apple computers in his bedroom, essentially.  And so, to look at all these companies like Yahoo and Apple and all the rest, at the stage where they're just operating out of garages, is really interesting stuff, and it’s by far the best resource I know in terms of getting a better idea as to what this whole technology start-up thing is about. 

VII. Conclusion

And with that I think I’ve exhausted everything I want to say, but I’m more than happy to answer whatever questions people have.