Startup, Education, Innovation & Hiring Lessons from Tomorrowland (movie)
I watched Tomorrowland: A World Beyond (2015 movie directed by Brad Bird) in Oct 2015 and even though it is yet another science fiction movie (plus it performed below expectations at box office), I found hidden insights related to startups, funding, hiring, education, innovation etc. in the movie.
Scene: At 3:23 minutes in the movie, a kid, Francis Walker, opening his bag containing a jet pack at New York’s World Fair in 1964 in front of another kid Athena.
Francis Walker: My name is John Francis Walker. I am here to win the $50… I took it [i.e. jetpack] apart because of the nitrogen compartment. Seeing as how the bus ride was kind of bumpy and you know nitro. I could’ve used a hydrogen peroxide-powered engine. Bell Labs tested that with their Rocket Belt and I guess there were some issues with maneuverability, flight duration, and stuff. It’s a jet pack, obviously.
Athena: You made this yourself? Did you or didn’t you?
Walker: What?
Athena: Did you make this yourself?
Walker: Yeah.
Athena: Why?
Walker: I guess I got tired of waiting around for someone else to do it for me.
Quoting Michael Arrington (Founder, Techcrunch):
“Best startups generally come from somebody needing to scratch an itch.” — Michael Arrington
In other words, entrepreneurs get tired of waiting around for someone else to make things people want.
Scene: At 20:57 minutes in the movie, when a kid Nate is talking to his teen sister Casey
Nate: Why are they taking the platform down [i.e. NASA’a decommissioned launchpad in Cape Canaveral in the movie] ?
Casey: Because it’s hard to have ideas and easy to give up.
But what if the things around us are the exact opposite of this? That is, what if it’s easy to have ideas and no reason to give up. Well, that is the exact case as of this writing (Oct 2015) with the bubble in the Indian (and maybe Silicon Valley) startup ecosystem. These days every self-proclaimed entrepreneur seems to have the next world domination idea and combine that with irrational exuberance in startup valuations and funding, it feels more like Disruptive Stagnation (as opposed to Clayton Christensen’s Disruptive Innovation).
Scene: At 23:06 minutes in the movie, when Casey is trying to cheer up her disheartened dad, Eddie, by telling him a story
Casey: There are two wolves.
Eddie: Casey! please..
Casey: You told me this story my entire life, and now I’m telling you. There are two wolves, and they’re always fighting. One is darkness and despair. The other is light and hope. Which wolf wins?
Eddie: Whichever one you feed.
Casey: Good.
This scene reminded me of a quote by Albert Einstein:
“Learn from yesterday, live for today, hope for tomorrow. The important thing is not to stop questioning.” — Albert Einstein
Scene: At 23:44 minutes in the movie, the scene mocks our dysfunctional brick-and-mortar education system
I cannot do justice to this scene by quoting the dialogues. So, here is the entire scene for your viewing pleasure:
Having gotten a first-hand experience at a dysfunctional Indian college for 6 years and having done a dozen or so online courses, I can totally relate my experiences to this scene. I would love to see more alternative education systems such as online courses(Udacity, Coursera, EdX, Khan Academy etc.), The Recurse Center, FreeCodeCamp to name a few. Quoting David Wiley:
“Why can’t we take robotics at Carnegie Mellon, linear algebra at MIT, law at Stanford? And why can’t we put 130 of those together and make it a degree?” — David Wiley
Scene: At 40:56 minutes in the movie, David Nix (leader of Tomorrowland in movie) tells why Tomorrowland exists in first place
David Nix: Have you ever wondered what would happen if all the geniuses, the artists, the scientists, the smartest, most creative people in the world, decided to actually change it? But where? Where could they even do such a thing? They’d need a place free from politics and bureaucracy, distractions, greed.
“Where can we even do such a thing?” Let’s take Elon Musk as an example. In the early days of SpaceX and Tesla, he was trying to change the world and humanity for the greater good. But he had to go through politics, bureaucracy and negative criticism. For a detailed account, read Ashlee Vance’s account of Elon Musk in his unauthorized biography.
Scene: At 51:15 minutes in the movie, teen Casey is talking to another kid/robot Athena
(The pin referenced in this scene signifies that the person who got the pin was recruited for Tomorrowland, which is a fictional futuristic city in an ambiguous dimension in the movie)
Casey: Hold on. You said that you gave me your last pin. How many other people did you give them to?
Athena: Not important.
Casey: Huh, I’m not even your first choice.
Athena: I only found you a month ago when you started wantingly destroying government property which happens to go on my search parameters for recruitment.
“..destroying government property which happens to go on my search parameters for recruitment”. When was the last time you met such a bold and opportunistic HR. This is the exact reason I hate self-proclaimed HRs with ‘just an MBA’. My commentary for this scene is merged with the commentary for the next scene. So, read on for the next scene!
Scene: At 118:04 minutes in the movie, a kid robot recruiter asks a question to Frank Waller related to hiring new candidates for Tomorrowland
Kid: Frank Walker, may I ask a question?
Frank Walker: Sure. *nods*
Kid: The search parameters you have given us, while mathematically sound, are a bit undefined. Could you be more specific please?
Frank Walker: Well, Ms. Newton, you want to tell our new recruiters what they are looking for?
Casey Newton: Dreamers! We are looking for dreamers.
The last two scenes (mentioned above) point out important lessons for hiring that most of the startups and HRs miss out. Why? Mainly because getting an MBA these days is easy-peasy (at least in countries like India where gazillions of colleges offer an MBA degree). And once you join the MBA herd, with so many startups mushrooming, the obvious choice for many is to join the Human Resources (HR) team to assist companies with hiring.
What these companies need to understand that hiring is inherently a slow process, requires unconventional approaches to find top talent and that hiring should not be driven either by past jobs/education or by intuition. Let’s break this down:
1. Hiring is an inherently slow process:
Quoting Brian Chesky (Founder/CEO of Airbnb):
“So the first employee was our first engineer, I think we looked for him for four or five months. I probably looked through thousands of people and interviewed hundreds of people.” — Brian Chesky
2. Hiring requires unconventional approaches (along with the conventional ones):
Quoting from Chapter-9 titled Liftoff from Elon Musk’s unauthorized biography by Ashlee Vance:
The SpaceX hiring model places some emphasis on getting top marks at top schools. But most of the attention goes toward spotting engineers who have exhibited type A personality traits over the course of their lives. The company’s recruiters look for people who might excel at robot-building competitions or who are car-racing hobbyists who have built unusual vehicles. The object is to find individuals who ooze passion, can work well as part of a team, and have real-world experience bending metal. “We were looking for people that had been building things since they were little,” said Dolly Singh, who spent five years as the head of talent acquisition at SpaceX… Singh relied on a handful of enterprising techniques to find them. She became famous for trawling through academic papers to find engineers with very specific skills, cold-calling researchers at labs and plucking possessed engineers out of college. At trade shows and conferences, SpaceX recruiters wooed interesting candidates they had spotted with a cloak-and-dagger shtick.
So, if you want to hire the top talent, you won’t find them in your backyard. You might need to visit competitions/hackathons/conferences, find hobbyists, read academic research papers (or maybe find people who are destroying government property, as shown in the movie) etc.
Moreover, rather than relying just on conventional platforms (like LinkedIn, Angellist Jobs etc), one should also be on lookout for talent on unconventional platforms. Belong.co is one such platform. Unlike other job search/listing platforms, Belong.co does not allow candidates to make their profiles. Instead, belong.co has a smart crawling engine that crawls candidate’s data from Internet and builds a candidate profile using this data (and other nifty features built on top of this). I recommended Belong.co to my ex-employer but they did a cost-benefit analysis and found that it would not be worth it. In my opinion, Belong.co is one of it’s kind tool for hiring and my ex-employer’s decision to reject it based on a Skype screen-sharing demo & a cost-benefit analysis didn’t do justice to assess it’s capabilities.
In another instance, I got an email from Srihari Maneru (co-founder of Almabase) about a job opportunity at Almabase. As an engineer, every week I get at least half-a-dozen boring+frustrating job opportunity emails, PMs/DMs, Linkedin invites etc. from HRs and founders. Some of these emails are generic job description templates and sent out in bulk to hundreds of candidates at regular intervals. But Srihari’s email was the first one that was personalized. And when I say “personalized”, I don’t mean it lightly. Srihari recorded a 50-second video exclusively for “me” to pitch Almabase:
I must confess… This is a first, in my entire career over past 2.5 years. He clearly had done his homework as he also mentioned:
“…Your Github looks awesome… I particularly like your Instagram project.Its amazing and fun…”
Woah Sri! I was impressed, seriously impressed. Unfortunately, I could not go forward with the interview (as I’m building a product of my own at the moment). But keep it up, Almabase. There is no reason to follow the HR herds and job agencies who are busy spamming inboxes with job opportunities.
[EDIT: April 26, 2016] Stripe launched their “Bring Your Own Team” program recently. Quoting their announcement:
“…you’re stronger as a team than you are apart… Stripe knows it too. Which is why we’d love you — that is, we’d love you and your collaborators — to apply together to work at Stripe. We call it Bring Your Own Team. Any group of 2 to 5 people can apply as a team to Stripe, by emailing byot@stripe.com. We’re expecting teams to be primarily software engineers, but we’d love to see well-established collaborations between engineers and designers, managers, or product managers…[we will] bring you all to the office on the same day, and try to design at least one interview problem that you can work on as a team. If we make an offer, we’ll make it to all of you, at the same time; you’d all be free to accept or decline individually, but of course we’d hope you’d all accept…This is an experiment and we’ll tweak it as we go.”
I guess what Stripe did is a first in our industry. Kudos to them!
TL;DR: We can’t rely just on conventional tools and approaches anymore to hire top talent.
3. Hiring should not give excessive emphasis to past job experience or formal education:
Except maybe for engineering roles at companies like SpaceX, companies should not give excessive emphasis to education or past jobs while hiring people. Quoting TripleByte’s blogpost (which work with Y Combinator startups to assist them with hiring):
“What the industry needs is a way to screen candidates by looking at their actual ability, not where they went to school or worked in the past.”
Quoting Shakthi Kannan from his epic i want 2 do project tell me wat 2 do article-esque presentation:
so-called “student” + degree != engineer
You cannot buy knowledge.
4. Hiring should not be driven by intuition:
Having worked in/with 5 Indian startups in past 2 years, I strongly disagree when startups choose to use their intuition (rather than hard-learned lessons published elsewhere) to guide their hiring process. In my humble opinion, rather than driving hiring using intuition, one should read up stuff like:
- Work Rules book by Laszlo Bock (Head of People Operations at Google)
- Blog of triplebyte.com
- Books like Rework, Peopleware (to retain employees once you have hired them)
- etc.
I have much more to say about hiring but the topic of hiring deserves a detailed post of it’s own. Moreover, this blogpost is supposed to talk about the Tomorrowland movie. An early draft of my blogpost on hiring is ready and I expect to publish it sometime soon.
My verdict about Tomorrowland movie
So, my verdict! If you ask me, Tomorrowland is at least a one-time watch. It’s a fun, science fiction movie with many hidden lessons (Free bonus: It stars George Clooney if you like him). Go for it!
Thanks to tortoick, Pawan Rawal, Akhil Tak and Shaifali Agrawal for reading early draft(s) of this post.
Last edited: April 26, 2016
