A tale of three cities

San Francisco..London..Berlin.

Three great world cities. On the google map of every connoisseur traveller. vibrant. iconic. happening.

Also home to the aspirations of your quintessential nerd. Home to the dreams of many an aspirant geek. Home to three top tech ecosystems.

I have had the privilege of visiting all three ecosystems and immerse into the world of startups and their richie rich founders. There is commonality of spirit and purpose across these ecosystems. Everything is possible. All business models are up for disruption. A constant stream of dollars, pounds and euros flow through the veins of the ecosystem. Designer cool workplaces of the future, as if timeported into the present.

People in these ecosystems believe they can change the world. Patent protection is not top of mind. A culture of openness and sharing permeates. Optimism and energy levels are unparalleled. And across all these ecosystems the entities are pretty much the same. A slew of investment vehicles from angels to VCs. Top notch universities nurturing the talent. Events to ripple the excitement. Co-working places. Cool coffee shops and hangouts of the physical variety. loads of startups with novel ideas. bootcamps, accelerators, incubators, corporate labs, et al.

I did however taste a slightly different favour in each of these ecosystems. The specific spices added to each dish left a distinct mark on the overall experience. 

The Valley is of course the undisputed King. No one else comes close. Someone remarked that the weather is an additional critical cog in the ecosystem. Perhaps it is. But overall, the ecosystem is mature in all aspects. One wave ahead of the rest of the crowd. Diversity is so embedded that no one even talks about it. Capital is a commodity and startups get a long rope to explore their passions, from one seed cycle to another. Core techy invention is at the heart. There are so many unicorns around that they are no longer the celebrities. The university-startup alliance is very strong. Corporates have thronged with their labs and incubators. Abundance of everything else except  real estate. Quite expensive to setup and run. Talent is difficult to attract but if you manage to, it is of super top quality. The valley leads and everyone else emulates.

London's silicon roundabout started as a good pun. However the ecosystem has taken off. The City may still compete for the talent but there is definitely a magnetic attraction to the tech ecosystem. The big fish have invested big time with their multi-storey campuses and co-working places. Tech interacts quite nicely with design and a number of ideas blossom at this intersection. Successful exists such as deepmind retain their iconic status and everyone still talks about them. Gov's facilitative role is quite visible and quite essential at this stage of the maturity curve. University-startup links exist but are definitely not as strong as the Valley. Weather however needs a business model transformation.

Berlin was a pleasant surprise. Very vibrant indeed. Bubbling with new found excitement. Much younger, much more hep, and with a lot of character. Everyone speaks about diversity with pride. An excellent inflow of talent from Eastern Europe and also from the rest of the world. Art nicely mixes with tech and creates quite a novel experience. Funds flow through the veins however at a rather placid pace. You get a feeling that there are many more women here than in others, but not sure if this is empirically the case. The ecosystem pretty much like a open, harmonious cult. Everyone knows everyone. Everyone ready to help everyone. Iconic cafes where dreams are crafted and networks formed. The character of this historic city adds an aesthetic appeal to the ecosystem which is second to none.

Quite an experience this. 

Seeing these iconic cities intimately from this uniquely nerdy lens. 

Quite an experience this.

Immersing in their ecosystems and understanding what makes them tick.

Quite an experience this.

Flowing in the startup passion of massively transformative purposes

Quite a tale this.

A tale of three great cities. 

The Quantum Inspiration

It’s one hell of a mystery. 

At the very heart of our existence. 

Scientists have clearly been able to see what happens but why it happens is anybody’s guess. Whenever I read about it, the mathematics of course goes at right angles to my brain, by the metaphysical connotation inspires me.  The quantum world defies intuition.

The two-slit experiment is perhaps the most simple way to highlight the mystery. If you shoot small solid steel balls (say) through a wall which has a hole, then on the other side you will see a pattern of hits emerge where the balls have gone through the hole and reached the other side. Similarly if you send a water wave through this wall with 1 hole, a wave pattern will emerge on the other side. 

If the same is repeated with a wall with two holes, the solid balls will produce two distinct patterns on the other side, parallel to the two holes.  Whereas the water waves will produce a "diffraction" pattern – big lines where the crests of the wave1 out of hole 1 merge with wave 2 out of hole 2 and nothing where the crest and troughs of these waves cancel out. Something like that. But what is important is that the pattern on the other side of the wall with two holes is clearly different for a wave versus a solid particle.

So this same experiment was then done with electrons. When we shoot an electron across a wall with 1 hole, it produces a pattern similar to a solid, as expected. Cool. Nothing creepy thus far. 

However when we shoot electrons across a wall with two holes, to everyone’s shock it produces a wave type pattern on the other side. How can this be? How can a solid particle produce a wave type pattern when there are two holes?  Even if we slow down the electron gun so that only 1 electron can pass through the hole at any one time, and we look at the pattern, it is again a wave pattern.  If we close 1 hole just before the electrons can enter them, then the electron will produce a particle type pattern. If we open both holes at the last moment then it produces a wave type pattern. The whole experiment gets a notch higher on creepy, when we put someone to observe the electrons. To see which damn hole are they passing through. Think of eyes just before the holes. As soon as we introduce an observer in the mix, with two holes, the electron will clearly produce a particle like pattern and forget that it was a wave.  Remove the observer and you are back to wave type pattern.

It is as if the electron knows that there are two holes and it becomes a wave.  It as if the electron knows that there is an observer and it becomes a particle, stuff it whether there are one or two holes.

Bizarre isn’t it.

So the smarts have done a lot of theories to explain this. One explanation being that in the quantum world nothing is real till someone actually observes it. There is nothing deterministic. You can only guess in terms of probabilities where an electron can be at any given time.  The particles exist in a state of superposition i.e. many states at once. It is like there are a number of ghost electrons in different states and when we observe them, they collapse into one, producing the reality we see. 

The fact that superposition exists is fully verified. In fact quantum computers use exactly this concept.  Unlike a classical bit which can either be 0 or 1, a qubit or quantum bit can be 1 and 0 at the same time. Hence quantum computers are exponentially powerful than the normal ones.

The other interesting theory which tries to explain superposition and other quantum mysteries is that there are multiple universes and an electron is in hole 1 in one universe and hole 2 in another. Both these universes are real and at perpendicular to each other. They get created at the instance of time when there are such quantum choices to be made. For observers in each of these universes there is one reality which is real. So there are no ghost particles. At the point when the electron has to make a choice between the two holes, two universes are formed and each of those are real.

Besides superposition there is another interesting phenomenon called entanglement. Simply put when quantum particles are in physical contact and then they split, the particles get entangled invisibly. Then an action on one can instantaneously cause an associated action on the other.  Irrespective of the distance. So when a photon splits into two and we take one of them say to the moon and the other is on earth and we change the spin of one of them, the other’s spin will change immediately. Again information seems to flow from one photon ("i have changed my spin") to the other at much faster than the speed of light, in defiance to the theory of relativity. The photons act as if they were physically interconnected whilst they are clearly not. Since Big bang created all particles in the universe, there is a viewpoint that all of us are thus entangled at the quantum level!

Quite a world this. The small world of atomic particles. The world of quantum.

It also offers some metaphysical inspirations:

• Reality is what you make of it
• There is a world of possibilities out there
• We make  a choice when we observe and convert these possibilities into one reality 
• There might be multiple universes out there
• In order to traverse to another universe we need to go back in time and then take a different fork from the point there is a split
• The world is interconnected in some invisible way
• Being kind to others is like being kind to a larger you
• Dreams might be where we go across to these perpendicular universes

Interesting. Bizarre. Mysterious. Quantum.