Dispatches from Boston Fintech Week 2023 – Day 0
This post for all readers, takes a break from the public peer-review process for the book about Making Good Decisions, to provide a man-on-the-ground dispatch about Day 0 of Boston Fintech Week 2003.
Day 1 of Boston Fintech Week 2023 starts today, and Day 0, a series of corporate events based on RSVP invitations took place yesterday.
Traveling to Boston, what used to be a daily commute for 30 years, reminded me that I had not done so since March 11, 2020, and that my last man-on-the-ground reporting about Boston Fintech Week took place in 2019. (See that report -published on LinkedIn – thus impossible to find as I looked for a link – as an appendix to this report).
At the end of the day, two words come to mind: “Destruction and Creation” which led me to re-reading notes on John Boyd’s 1976, 16-page essay by the same name, and its key question: How do we improve our capacity for independent action?
In what ways does BFW 2023 feels different from BFW 2019?
Subject to further reporting about Day 1 and Day 2, something felt different.
The joy of seeing old friends and familiar faces, after several years of Zoom-like electronic disembodiment, felt like old times. However, this was tempered by a recurring question - How did you come out of COVID? – reminding us of those we can no longer see.
What Robert Buderi in his book about the history of Kendall Square calls “Human Collisions” seemed more heart-felt, and less transactional that before. Some even remembered reading my LinkedIn posts from the Covid-Walks Encounters series, and ‘Lectronic-Street Encounters series, and asked: Do you still talk to you dog when you walk?
The exuberance of 30x sales valuations, and the excitement of pre-seed before seed companies has been replaced with the need to build real companies, with revenues and profits instead of hope-and-change deficit-funding.
More concretely, the commute to Boston no longer felt like a commute, but felt closer to a demolition derby. Road surfaces look the worst in a 40+ years memory. I do no remember seeing so many ambulances, and police cars plowing through traffic with full gyros on and blaring sirens, nor do I remember witnessing so many near-collisions, disabled trucks, and real-time car collisions during a commute. Something definitely different here.
Kudos to Sarah Biller and her team for putting Boston Fintech Week together again at a time when everything seem more difficult, for it paves up the road for the next wave, and those who come after us. As the commute to Boston shows the road needs some serious repaving.
Appendix:
Dispatches from Boston Fintech Week 2019
A few years ago, a Mississippian recommended “Dispatches from Pluto” to understand the spirit of his State. The book provides a vivid variety of vignettes. We may never see the full picture but we can remember highlights that capture the spirit of the time.
Entrepreneurs are the energy that drives innovation systems. Boston Fintech Week is a bright congregation of entrepreneurs, and those that would help them. These are the Dispatches from Boston Fintech Week 2019…
Day 1
A client-perspective discussion in the corridors of the Federal Reserve Bank of Boston on Day 1 of Boston Fintech Week 2019:
Last year’s popular business model seemed to be client-as-a-product.
This year’s popular business model seems to be something-as-a-service.
What happens when something-as-a-service is applied to long-lasting, mission-critical applications?
- Does it become an implied promise to stay in business for the long run, like an insurance company?
Day 2
A conversation in a meeting room at 100 High Street on Day 2 of Boston Fintech Week:
A friend asked: How do you build trust with entrepreneurs?
The presence of an absorbing barrier in a game of repetition focuses the mind: One has to survive in order to continue to play. Entrepreneurs innovate by facing several absorbing barriers: Time, Money, and - perhaps most importantly - Reputation. Reputation is what it takes to earn the right to try again.
How does the presence of helpers change the location of the entrepreneurs’ absorbing barriers?
- How would you measure Boston’s 50+ incubators and accelerators as reputation proxies for new entrepreneurs?
Day 3
Standing in a beer garden near South Station at the end of Day 3 of Boston Fintech Week:
A sponsor observed that placing the first dot on a blank canvas is a decisive step in starting a painting because it structures all that comes after it. We need a focus, a perspective, to see what stands in front of us.
Listening to the debates about our ability to explain the results of AI/ML:
- Are results from theory-free, Big Data, model-fitting Machine Learning closer to the jarring surfaces of Cubism or are they closer to the narrated perspectives of the Italian Renaissance?
Day 4
Boston Fintech Week’s closing party on Day 4 reminded me of the early days of Common Angels: Bottom-up, and self-organizing deal-making driven by-and-for entrepreneurs
Boston Fintech Week is both broader and deeper than conventional Fintech conferences:
- It lasts longer (4 days), and the events last longer (hours, not minutes)
- It operates at the scale of a City instead of a hotel, and offers a larger number of events
Perhaps, most importantly, it matches the ethos of entrepreneurial deal-making by making attendees build their own, individualized program:
- The registration system works as a behavioral filter
- Attendees have to seek it out for updates in order to decide where they want to be, when, who they want to meet, and how to get there
Did you go to Boston Fintech Week to be entertained in comfortable hospitality, or did you go to get something done?
Data Angels
Boston Fintech Week creates a focus, a perspective, that reveals the depth and breadth of Boston’s start-up ecosystem.
This ecosystem can be mapped as a nested hierarchy of differentiated participants living and dealing in a flow of energy that includes:
- high-potential energy reservoirs (e.g. capital providers and revenue sources),
- primary energy converters (entrepreneurs), and
- residual energy converters (e.g. lawyers, bankers, consultants, and data-providers).
Boston’s Fintech ecosystem includes Data Angels such as Fintech Sandbox.
Given that Data Angels rather than “Common Angels” drive this event, one wonders if this signals the emergence of a new rate-limiting-factor, a new governing scarcity, in the ecosystem:
- Is a new governing scarcity of signal-from-noise (i.e. providers of non-random observations) replacing the previous governing scarcity of capital-for-equity (i.e. providers of good money)?
Human Oracles
Turing’s idea of o-machines (oracle-machines) is a counter-weight to the closed, formal system limitations of standard computable functions (a-machines).
The practice of machine-analytics, automated algorithmic statistics, may be closer to o-machines than a-machines but suffers the limitations of an expanded error-term: The problem of induction (transposed conditionals), clinical ambiguity, quantified measurement doubt, confounding variables, systematic error (bias), cherry-picking (willful blindness), radical uncertainty (randomness regimes), path dependency, etc.
Machine-analytics in a noisy human environment requires common sense, “We can know more than we can tell”, to sort out the accurately practical from the erroneous possible.
- How do you include human oracles in your practice and use of automated, algorithmic statistics, AI, ML, Big Data, et al.?
“CTRI by Francois Gadenne” writes a book in three volumes, published at the rate of one two-pages section per day on Substack for public peer-review. The book connects the dots of life-enhancing practices for the next generation, free of controlling algorithms, based on the lifetime experience of a retirement age entrepreneur, & continuously updated with insights from reading Wealth, Health, & Statistics (i.e. AI/ML/LLM) research papers on behalf of large companies as the co-founder of CTRI.