Stanford West 30 Day Notice: Fill & Download for Free

First off, let’s define the term with Sergey Brin and Larry Page’s dictionary:innovative: featuring new methods; advanced and original.These days, I think the argument might be made for “Are Stanford University graduates more innovative than graduates of other institutes?” or similar.The 30 most successful Stanford alumni of all timeList of Stanford University peopleYou noticed I omitted “significantly” because I don’t think there is a single institution that can claim significantly “more innovative” students than others, but given most of the top dot coms these days that have unicorn status or similar headed up or founded by Stanford grads, the west coast school may take the cake instead of Harvard.When you really think about it, Harvard seems to have the best conformists given they have “conformed” to the standards which allow them to enter the “elite” university. Or you may argue, Harvard has significantly “savvier students” than other institutions possibly minus Stanford, given they seem to find their ways to the top echelons one way or another.However, I still feel you should omit the “significantly.”

We have a terrific public transportation system in Seattle and the surrounding King County. Also, our Washington State ferry system is the largest in the world. What’s cool is that for less than 10 bucks, you can take an hour-long ferryboat ride to Bremerton, visit their cute downtown core, then take the boat back — for free. Just walk on, it’s that simple. I’ve sometimes told visitors if they have 3 or 4 hours to kill, why not take a ferry ride? People have been known to see Dahl’s porpoises, orcas, sea lions and many other sea creatures. Plus the scenery is GORGEOUS! On a clear day, I’ve seen Mts. Baker, Rainier and St. Helens soon after leaving Colman Dock in downtown Seattle. Three volcanoes, no waiting. Oh, something I saw AT the Docks, between the car ferry terminal and walk-on ferry terminal: a bald eagle. Right there in downtown Seattle. It was circling around, then headed NW to Discovery Park in the Magnolia neighborhood (the largest park in Seattle — has been known for cougar sightings).Another very cool thing about Seattle: It’s so easy to walk to so many places, including the Pike Place market and waterfront/ferry docks. You can go from the Market, down the “Hillclimb” directly to Alaskan Way, along Elliott Bay. Visit the Aquarium, Ye Olde Curiosity Shop and one of the original Ivar’s restaurants.Visit in the Summer. You may think it rains a lot in Seattle, but that’s a myth. Many larger cities get more rain, including NYC, Atlanta and Chicago. Our Summers are always dry; we’ve even had water rationing before. And Seattle is BEAUTIFUL in the Summer! Come in June, after the kids are out of school. We get real heat in July and August (103F is our record!). (Our Rain Festival is September to May, so if you’re coming at that time — yeah, it’s going to be damp and drizzly, but rarely downpouring).Seattle’s not a very big “big city,” either. I can walk North to South through the downtown core (about Virginia St to Pioneer Square) in about 20 minutes at a comfortable pace. Right about University Strett and south, the East-West Streets start getting hillier and hillier. By the time you get to James Street, it’s akin to San Francisco hilly. But around the “main” downtown core it’s flat to a slight incline, that’s all. The Market is more stairs than hills; LOTS of stairs! It’s built on a very sharp hill, almost cliff-like (see the aforementioned Hill Climb).All told, downtown Seattle’s a great place to walk. Bring your comfy shoes, water bottle, sunglasses (no kidding!), camera and light backpack and enjoy the strolls. Also lots of great shopping, including the flagship Nordstrom store at 5th & Pine, and the original Starbucks in Post Alley at the Market. There’s also a real grocery store at the heart of the downtown core at 3rd & Union (not just a little convenience store), including a great, fast deli. Used to go there a lot when I only had 30 minutes for lunch.Yes, Seattle can be expensive, but I don’t have a very large income and I manage to have quite a good time. If you like the Bohemian scene, hop an eastbound Metro bus to Capitol Hill. One landmark is a great statue of Jimi Hendrix, across from Seattle Central Community College. Tons of cool shops on Cap Hill, the most densely populated neighborhood north of San Francisco. Seattle’s very neighborhood-oriented; each one has its own unique culture. Google “Seattle Neighborhoods” and see what you get. I personally love Capitol Hill, Fremont, Wallingford, Ballard, Magnolia and the U-District.You should at least go to Fremont, if you love strange statues. They have Lenin, a rocket-ship and the world-famous Fremont Troll. The Troll resides under the I-5 Bridge, and if you see photos, you’ll notice he’s clutching what appears to be a VW Bug. In case it wasn’t captioned, just think… that’s a LIFE SIZED VW Bug! That’s how huge the Troll is. Worth the bus ride up there just for that. An even stranger pair of statues is further south, near Boeing Field: the Giant Hat & Boots. A bus goes nearby (the #131 last I checked), so go see them too, in Georgetown. Go a little further south, to the Boeing Museum of Flight. You can see (and touch, as I have) the very first 747 aka “The City of Everett”, named after the city in which it was built (in the largest building in the world, by volume).I could go on and on (which I have), but yeah… in summation, Seattle itself is great, and we have a LOT of things to see and do in the immediately surrounding area. If you’re into nature, you can go even further out (I use public transpo so I’ve not done this) and access hiking, kayaking, fishing and other outdoor activities within an hour’s drive.

Elon Musk, for those unfamiliar, is the world’s raddest man.I’ll use this post to explore how he became a self-made billionaire and the real-life inspiration for Iron Man’s Tony Stark, but for the moment, I’ll let Richard Branson explain things brieflyWhatever skeptics have said can’t be done, Elon has gone out and made real. Remember in the 1990s, when we would call strangers and give them our credit-card numbers? Elon dreamed up a little thing called PayPal. His Tesla Motors and SolarCity companies are making a clean, renewable-energy future a reality…his SpaceX [is] reopening space for exploration…it’s a paradox that Elon is working to improve our planet at the same time he’s building spacecraft to help us leave it.So no, that was not a phone call I had been expecting.A few days later, I found myself in pajama pants, pacing frantically around my apartment, on the phone with Elon Musk. We had a discussion about Tesla, SpaceX, the automotive and aerospace and solar power industries, and he told me what he thought confused people about each of these things. He suggested that if these were topics I’d be interested in writing about, and it might be helpful, I could come out to California and sit down with him in person for a longer discussion.For me, this project was one of the biggest no-brainers in history. Not just because Elon Musk is Elon Musk, but because here are two separate items that have been sitting for a while in my “Future Post Topics” document, verbatim:– “electric vs hybrid vs gas cars, deal with tesla, sustainable energy”– “spacex, musk, mars?? how learn to do rockets??”I already wanted to write about these topics, for the same reason I wrote about Artificial Intelligence—I knew they would be hugely important in the future but that I also didn’t understand them well enough. And Musk is leading a revolution in both of these worlds.It would be like if you had plans to write about the process of throwing lightning bolts and then one day out of the blue Zeus called and asked if you wanted to question him about a lot of stuff.So it was on. The plan was that I’d come out to California, see the Tesla and SpaceX factories, meet with some of the engineers at each company, and have an extended sit down with Musk. Exciting.The first order of business was to have a full panic. I needed to not sit down with these people—these world-class engineers and rocket scientists—and know almost nothing about anything. I had a lot of quick learning to do.The problem with Elon Fucking Musk, though, is that he happens to be involved in all of the following industries:AutomotiveAerospaceSolar EnergyEnergy StorageSatelliteHigh-Speed Ground TransportationAnd, um, Multi-Planetary ExpansionZeus would have been less stressful.So I spent the two weeks leading up to the West Coast visit reading and reading and reading, and it became quickly clear that this was gonna need to be a multi-post series. There’s a lot to get into.We’ll dive deep into Musk’s companies and the industries surrounding them in the coming posts, but today, let’s start by going over exactly who this dude is and why he’s such a big deal.12← click theseThe Making of Elon MuskNote: There’s a great biography on Musk coming out May 19th, written by tech writer Ashlee Vance. I was able to get an advance copy, and it’s been a key source in putting together these posts. I’m going to keep to a brief overview of his life here—if you want the full story, get the bio.Musk was born in 1971 in South Africa. Childhood wasn’t a great time for him—he had a tough family life and never fit in well at school.2 But, like you often read in the bios of extraordinary people, he was an avid self-learner early on. His brother Kimbal has said Elon would often read for 10 hours a day—a lot of science fiction and eventually, a lot of non-fiction too. By fourth grade, he was constantly buried in the Encyclopedia Britannica.One thing you’ll learn about Musk as you read these posts is that he thinks of humans as computers, which, in their most literal sense, they are. A human’s hardware is his physical body and brain. His software is the way he learns to think, his value system, his habits, his personality. And learning, for Musk, is simply the process of “downloading data and algorithms into your brain.”3Among his many frustrations with formal classroom learning is the “ridiculously slow download speed” of sitting in a classroom while a teacher explains something, and to this day, most of what he knows he’s learned through reading.He became consumed with a second fixation at the age of nine when he got his hands on his first computer, the Commodore VIC-20. It came with five kilobytes of memory and a “how to program” guide that was intended to take the user six months to complete. Nine-year-old Elon finished it in three days. At 12, he used his skills to create a video game called Blastar, which he told me was “a trivial game…but better than Flappy Bird.” But in 1983, it was good enough to be sold to a computer magazine for $500 ($1,200 in today’s money)—not bad for a 12-year-old.3Musk never felt much of a connection to South Africa—he didn’t fit in with the jockish, white Afrikaner culture, and it was a nightmare country for a potential entrepreneur. He saw Silicon Valley as the Promised Land, and at the age of 17, he left South Africa forever. He started out in Canada, which was an easier place to immigrate to because his mom is a Canadian citizen, and a few years later, used a college transfer to the University of Pennsylvania as a way into the US.4In college, he thought about what he wanted to do with his life, using as his starting point the question, “What will most affect the future of humanity?” The answer he came up with was a list of five things: “the internet; sustainable energy; space exploration, in particular the permanent extension of life beyond Earth; artificial intelligence; and reprogramming the human genetic code.”4He was iffy about how positive the impact of the latter two would be, and though he was optimistic about each of the first three, he never considered at the time that he’d ever be involved in space exploration. That left the internet and sustainable energy as his options.He decided to go with sustainable energy. After finishing college, he enrolled in a Stanford PhD program to study high energy density capacitors, a technology aimed at coming up with a more efficient way than traditional batteries to store energy—which he knew could be key to a sustainable energy future and help accelerate the advent of an electric car industry.But two days into the program, he got massive FOMO because it was 1995 and he “couldn’t stand to just watch the internet go by—[he] wanted to jump in and make it better.”5 So he dropped out and decided to try the internet instead.His first move was to go try to get a job at the monster of the 1995 internet, Netscape. The tactic he came up with was to walk into the lobby, uninvited, stand there awkwardly, be too shy to talk to anyone, and walk out.Musk bounced back from the unimpressive career beginning by teaming up with his brother Kimbal (who had followed Elon to the US) to start their own company—Zip2. Zip2 was like a primitive combination of Yelp and Google Maps, far before anything like either of those existed. The goal was to get businesses to realize that being in the Yellow Pages would become outdated at some point and that it was a good idea to get themselves into an online directory. The brothers had no money, slept in the office and showered at the YMCA, and Elon, their lead programmer, sat obsessively at his computer working around the clock. In 1995, it was hard to convince businesses that the internet was important—many told them that advertising on the internet sounded like “the dumbest thing they had ever heard of”6—but eventually, they began to rack up customers and the company grew. It was the heat of the 90s internet boom, startup companies were being snatched up left and right, and in 1999, Compaq snatched up Zip2 for $307 million. Musk, who was 27, made off with $22 million.In what would become a recurring theme for Musk, he finished one venture and immediately dove into a new, harder, more complex one. If he were following the dot-com millionaire rulebook, he’d have known that what you’re supposed to do after hitting it big during the 90s boom is either retire off into the sunset of leisure and angel investing, or if you still have ambition, start a new company with someone else’s money. But Musk doesn’t tend to follow normal rulebooks, and he plunged three quarters of his net worth into his new idea, an outrageously bold plan to build essentially an online bank—replete with checking, savings, and brokerage accounts—called http://X.com. This seems less insane now, but in 1999, an internet startup trying to compete with the large banks was unheard of.In the same building that http://X.com worked out of was another internet finance company called Confinity, founded by Peter Thiel and Max Levchin. One of http://X.com’s many features was an easy money-transfer service, and later, Confinity would develop a similar service. Both companies began to notice a strong demand for their money-transfer service, which put the two companies in sudden furious competition with each other, and they finally decided to just merge into what we know today as PayPal.This brought together a lot of egos and conflicting opinions—Musk was now joined by Peter Thiel and a bunch of other now-super-successful internet guys—and despite the company growing rapidly, things inside the office did not go smoothly. The conflicts boiled over in late 2000, and when Musk was on a half fundraising trip / half honeymoon (with his first wife Justine), the anti-Musk crowd staged a coup and replaced him as CEO with Thiel. Musk handled this surprisingly well, and to this day, he says he doesn’t agree with that decision but he understands why they did it. He stayed on the team in a senior role, continued investing in the company, and played an instrumental role in selling the company to eBay in 2002, for $1.5 billion. Musk, the company’s largest shareholder, walked away with $180 million (after taxes).5If there was ever a semblance of the normal life rulebook in Musk’s decision-making, it was at this point in his life—as a beyond-wealthy 31-year-old in 2002—that he dropped the rulebook into the fire for good.The subject of what he did over the next 13 years leading up to today is what we’ll thoroughly explore over the rest of this series. For now, here’s the short story:In 2002, before the sale of PayPal even went through, Musk started voraciously reading about rocket technology, and later that year, with $100 million, he started one of the most unthinkable and ill-advised ventures of all time: a rocket company called SpaceX, whose stated purpose was to revolutionize the cost of space travel in order to make humans a multi-planetary species by colonizing Mars with at least a million people over the next century.Mm hm.Then, in 2004, as that “project” was just getting going, Musk decided to multi-task by launching the second-most unthinkable and ill-advised venture of all time: an electric car company called Tesla, whose stated purpose was to revolutionize the worldwide car industry by significantly accelerating the advent of a mostly-electric-car world—in order to bring humanity on a huge leap toward a sustainable energy future. Musk funded this one personally as well, pouring in $70 million, despite the tiny fact that the last time a US car startup succeeded was Chrysler in 1925, and the last time someone started a successful electriccar startup was never.And since why the fuck not, a couple years later, in 2006, he threw in $10 million to found, with his cousins, another company, called SolarCity, whose goal was to revolutionize energy production by creating a large, distributed utility that would install solar panel systems on millions of people’s homes, dramatically reducing their consumption of fossil fuel-generated electricity and ultimately “accelerating mass adoption of sustainable energy.”7If you were observing all of this in those four years following the PayPal sale, you’d think it was a sad story. A delusional internet millionaire, comically in over his head with a slew of impossible projects, doing everything he could to squander his fortune.By 2008, this seemed to be playing out, to the letter. SpaceX had figured out how to build rockets, just not rockets that actually worked—it had attempted three launches so far and all three had blown up before reaching orbit. In order to bring in any serious outside investment or payload contracts, SpaceX had to show that they could successfully launch a rocket—but Musk said he had funds left for one and only one more launch. If the fourth launch also failed, SpaceX would be done.Meanwhile, up in the Bay Area, Tesla was also in the shit. They had yet to deliver their first car—the Tesla Roadster—to the market, which didn’t look good to the outside world. Silicon Valley gossip blog Valleywag made the Tesla Roadster its #1 tech company fail of 2007. This would have been more okay if the global economy hadn’t suddenly crashed, hitting the automotive industry the absolute hardest and sucking dry any flow of investments into car companies, especially new and unproven ones. And Tesla was running out of money fast.During this double implosion of his career, the one thing that held stable and strong in Musk’s life was his marriage of eight years, if by stable and strong you mean falling apart entirely in a soul-crushing, messy divorce.Darkness.But here’s the thing—Musk is not a fool, and he hadn’t built bad companies. He had built very, very good companies. It’s just that creating a reliable rocket is unfathomably difficult, as is launching a startup car company, and because no one wanted to invest in what seemed to the outside world like overambitious and probably-doomed ventures—especially during a recession—Musk had to rely on his own personal funds. PayPal made him rich, but not rich enough to keep these companies afloat for very long on his own. Without outside money, both SpaceX and Tesla had a short runway. So it’s not that SpaceX and Tesla were bad—it’s that they needed more time to succeed, and they were out of time.And then, in the most dire hour, everything turned around.First, in September of 2008, SpaceX launched their fourth rocket—and their last one if it didn’t successfully put a payload into orbit—and it succeeded. Perfectly.That was enough for NASA to say “fuck it, let’s give this Musk guy a try,” and it took a gamble, offering SpaceX a $1.6 billion contract to carry out 12 launches for the agency. Runway extended. SpaceX saved.The next day, on Christmas Eve 2008, when Musk scrounged up the last money he could manage to keep Tesla going, Tesla’s investors reluctantly agreed to match his investment. Runway extended. Five months later, things began looking up, and another critical investment came in—$50 million from Daimler. Tesla saved.While 2008 hardly marked the end of the bumps in the road for Musk, the overarching story of the next seven years would be the soaring, earthshaking success of Elon Musk and his companies.Since their first three failed launches, SpaceX has launched 20 times—all successes. NASA is now a regular client, and one of many, since the innovations at SpaceX have allowed companies to launch things to space for the lowest cost in history. Within those 20 launches have been all kinds of “firsts” for a commercial rocket company—to this day, the four entities in history who have managed to launch a spacecraft into orbit and successfully return it to Earth are the US, Russia, China—and SpaceX. SpaceX is currently testing their new spacecraft, which will bring humans to space, and they’re busy at work on the much larger rocket that will be able to bring 100 people to Mars at once. A recent investment by Google and Fidelity has valued the company at $12 billion.Tesla’s Model S has become a smashing success, blowing away the automotive industry with the highest ever Consumer Reports rating of a 99/100, and the highest safety rating in history from the National Highway Safety Administration, a 5.4/5. Now they’re getting closer and closer to releasing their true disruptor—the much more affordable Model 3—and the company’s market cap is just under $30 billion. They’re also becoming the world’s most formidable battery company, currently working on their giant Nevada “Gigafactory,” which will more than double the world’s total annual production of lithium-ion batteries.SolarCity, which went public in 2012, now has a market cap of just under $6 billion and has become the largest installer of solar panels in the US. They’re now building the country’s largest solar panel-manufacturing factory in Buffalo, and they’ll likely be entering into a partnership with Tesla to package their product with Tesla’s new home battery, the Powerwall.And since that’s not enough, in his spare time, Musk is pushing the development a whole new mode of transport—the Hyperloop.In a couple of years, when their newest factories are complete, Musk’s three companies will employ over 30,000 people. After nearly going broke in 2008 and telling a friend that he and his wife may have to “move into his wife’s parents’ basement,”8 Musk’s current net worth clocks in at $12.9 billion.All of this has made Musk somewhat of a living legend. In building a successful automotive startup and its worldwide network of Supercharger stations, Musk has been compared to visionary industrialists like Henry Ford and John D. Rockefeller. The pioneering work of SpaceX on rocket technology has led to comparisons to Howard Hughes, and many have drawn parallels between Musk and Thomas Edison because of the advancements in engineering Musk has been able to achieve across industries. Perhaps most often, he’s compared to Steve Jobs, for his remarkable ability to disrupt giant, long-stagnant industries with things customers didn’t even know they wanted. Some believe he’ll be remembered in a class of his own. Tech writer and Musk biographer Ashlee Vance has suggested that what Musk is building “has the potential to be much grander than anything Hughes or Jobs produced. Musk has taken industries like aerospace and automotive that America seemed to have given up on and recast them as something new and fantastic.”