Albuquerque & Microsoft, NotebookLM, & Hand-Carved Surfboards
Small Cities Weekly | 07.26.2024
As part of the work we are doing on the Small City Segment, we send out a brief weekly post of thoughts, links, and research in progress that reflect the week’s work. I’d love to hear from you if you have any thoughts, questions, disagreements, or things to add. Please forward this on to people you think might enjoy reading it.
What if…?
Our offices were here in fancy Albuquerque, up on the eighth floor of this building here. Albuquerque was great. There weren't many distractions there, but it was hard to recruit people as we tried to grow.
[…]
Well, it took a while for me to sell the idea to everybody. But, in fact, everyone, except my secretary, decided to make the move. Albuquerque has its advantages; warm weather, a nice place. So, it took quite a bit of selling. But, everybody was very involved in what they were doing, and there was the excitement behind where we were going. So, I was able to get literally everyone but my secretary, Miriam Lubow, to come up with us. And that became the core group. But Seattle was a lot better for hiring, particularly once Steve got in and really increased the rate a great deal.1
It’s little known that Microsoft got its start in Albuquerque.
Bill Gates and Paul Allen moved there in 1974 to be close to MITS, the builders of one the first personal computers, the Altair. MITS’ founder, Ed Roberts, was willing to take a chance on their new BASIC software program - in part to save his own company2.
And they stayed. For a while at least. Over the course of the next few years, the company expanded to almost 20 people, grew to millions of dollars in revenue, expanded internationally, and put themselves at the forefront of an entirely new industry.
But things changed. Their relationship with MITS soured. They couldn’t hire engineers as fast as they wanted. Recruiting to Albuquerque was difficult. So they moved backed to their hometown of Seattle.
The story is a bit perplexing. Many blogs have been written in retrospect about what the city should have done to try to keep this fast-growing technology company, how they had missed the opportunity of a generation. But if you look at Gate’s comments above, it’s hard to place any real blame. They liked Albuquerque. “Warm weather, a nice place…it took quite a bit of selling.”
I actually don’t know that there is much to take away from the what if…? question here. In fact, I think the only takeaway is that these things are much more fragile and complicated than they look. If hiring would’ve been easier, would they have stayed? Maybe. But it also seems that Gates and Allen liked the idea of being back home. It’s hard to blame them for that.
I guess my point is entrepreneurship is an unpredictable beast. That’s kind of the point - uncertainty is inherent. And therefore, outcomes are hard to control.
So sometimes, we will get unlucky - but that doesn’t mean our cities are doomed.
And other times we will lucky - but that doesn’t mean our cities are saved.
Links
You can find links from this and all previous editions here.
Is NotebookLM—Google's Research Assistant—the Ultimate Tool For Thought? - Ep.22 with Steven Johnson, AI & I (frm. How I Use ChatGPT) Podcast
So it just goes straight to Joseph Priestley, who I just mentioned, and Sheil, who also discovered oxygen independently. Oh, that's really cool. It brought up Picard. Yeah, this is great.
This is another idea I actually had never wrote about. I think we're building something good here, Dan. I love this. Are you going to want. Are you going to want a piece of this project or 10%?
So this guy, Picard, I wrote about this because I wrote about the discovery of the ozone layer, because I wrote about the guy who invented the Freon CFCs that caused a hole in the ozone layer. And so there's this explorer, August Picard, who went up to the stratosphere for the first time. And so this product just blows me away so many times. So, look at what it says here. So it reminds me of this story, which I thought was fascinating, but have never used, and it briefly describes it.
I've got a link back to the original citation, so I can go and read more about it. But this is what notebook says. This source provides an example of an early enclosed environment that relied on a pure oxygen similar to the Apollo one spacecraft, and notes the importance of respiration in such an environment. Oh, my God. And it gives this quote, as the professor remarked, when you face the possibility of shutting two men up in an airtight space of such small dimensions, you must study very carefully the problem of their respiration.
That's so cool. That's the opening to the book or the documentary or whatever. That's amazing. That's so cool.
The quote above shows a talented, best-selling author of non-fiction coming up with a new idea for a book/documentary in real-time, using one of Google’s new AI tools. I’ve used the tool a bit for podcast research and it’s really powerful. I think it could be powerful for founders in the early stages of forming a new idea as well - it can really help you spot hidden connections.
Telling Hawaii’s Stories, One Hand-Carved Surfboard at a Time, Will Higginbotham, NYTimes
Even among board makers, though, Kinimaka is unique. While he estimates he has shaped about 2,000 surfable wooden boards, a certain number are designed strictly for ornamentation. “I can put fiberglass around them, but I prefer not to,” he says. “I see them as a work of art.” Indeed, his majestic alaias — whose price point ranges from about $1,000 to $12,000 — have sold to museums and private collectors around the world.
It’s hardly a path that Kinimaka could have envisioned more than 40 years ago, when he was working in hospitality and as a lifeguard. After Hurricane Iwa in 1982, he moved into construction — “the only job available when people stopped visiting the islands,” he said. When another hurricane hit, he left for California, where he stayed for a decade and learned carpentry. In the early 2000s, he returned. “It was a great adventure, man, but home called me back, as it often does to us Hawaiians,” Kinimaka mused.
On his return, he committed himself to his wood shop, Royal Hawaiian Woodwork, and took on contract construction jobs. It wasn’t until 2009, though, that he made his first alaia. As with most crafts, it took courage, time and the guidance of a mentor to begin. Once he conquered the basics, he set out to find his own voice.
Admittedly, this has less to do with small cities than with someone who has turned a craft into a business. I just love stories and companies like this.
Reducing Friction, Rebuilding Trust: Investment Facilitation as a Tool for Economic Growth in US Underserved Markets, Nathan Kelly, Jake Cusack, Hannah Mae Merten, CrossBoundary
Current programs aimed at US underserved markets focus on the important work of de-risking investments through subsidies and guarantees that increase gross risk-adjusted returns, yet many markets still do not attract investment under these programs. To be effective, solutions must directly tackle the barriers of transaction costs and information asymmetries.
I got a chance to talk to two of the authors of this white paper this week and really enjoyed the conversation. Both elements they talk about - transaction costs and information asymmetries - land with me as being barriers to these ecosystems attracting capital, but also, I think founders and their products.
You can reach me at dustin@invanti.co if you want to chat more about the small city segment!
https://americanhistory.si.edu/comphist/gates.htm
https://every.to/the-crazy-ones/the-secret-father-of-modern-computing?sid=53613