Q&A with Norman Winarsky

You served as the president of SRI Ventures and pioneered a model of venture creation that flat-out works. What is the insight at the core of your methodology?

I served as the president of SRI Ventures from 2001 to 2016, and learned an incredible amount in that time, but we did develop a few core tenets I can share. The first of which is that we would only focus on creating groundbreaking venture opportunities. Even though we had over a 1000 researchers and hundreds of patents, we’d only launch 3 or 4 ventures a year. We wanted the best venture capitalists and the best venture concepts, the best founders and scientists and engineers behind the ideas. We found that working with people who were leaders in their respective fields brought a hidden benefit of their passion for not just their own success, but that of their projects and businesses as well.

The second part of our methodology was that we focused on solutions to market problems. Science and technology, and now some ventures by extension, get bogged down in the technology or the advancement thereof. That’s a natural part of progress, but it's wrong if you are creating a venture. 

If a venture was not addressing a market pain point, a great customer or business need, then we were not interested. If a venture was not addressing that unmet need in a breakthrough way, then we were not interested. I used to joke that I was addicted to technology myself, and so every morning I would have to inoculate myself against the technology, and start thinking about what the business opportunity is, and where the breakthrough lies.

Our third tenet was the common language at SRI that we would teach to everyone. We called it the “NABCs”, which were the fundamentals of creating a venture. It stood for need, approach, benefit, and customer. Curt Carlson, our CEO, and I evangelized this approach throughout SRI. This simple model allowed everyone to “speak the same language” when they were talking about creating a venture. Otherwise everyone would present ideas to us in such a diverse set of ways that we wouldn’t even be able to evaluate them.

The (N) stands for the market need or pain point.  We wanted “painkillers” not vitamins. The (A) was the approach – the solution to that customer problem. The (B) was the benefit – the quantitative benefit to the customer, and what its impact might be. Finally, the (C) was the competition – to have an intimate understanding of the competitor.

Of course NABCs were just the most basic elements of creating a venture, and there are many more elements necessary to create a great venture – such as team, business model, and more. My book, “If You Really Want to Change the World”  has a good description of these elements in Chapter 5. This was a way to have everyone understand what they needed to do to present a venture to us at the earliest stage.

What is the thing you miss most about working at SRI?

I would say it was the people: when I worked at SRI, I worked with world class scientists and technologists. They were not only leaders in their field, but also, because we were a contract research organization, everyone wanted to deliver solutions into the hands of customers, and see their work brought into the world. Working with these people was inspiring – even exhilarating sometimes.

Tell us a little bit about Gilman Louie and Jordan Blashek at America’s Frontier Fund. Why did you decide to get involved, and what is your role?

I was recruited to be a General Partner in America’s Frontier Fund by Gilman Louie, the CEO. Gilman is a great friend, and has a storied background – an early CEO of In-Q-Tel, a member of the President’s Intelligence Advisory Board, co-founder of Alsop-Louie, CEO of Spectrum HoloByte when it published Tetris, and more. I met Gilman when I was at SRI and after he started In-Q-Tel, the venture arm of the United States intelligence community. 

Jordan is the President, COO, and co-founder of America’s Frontier Fund, and he is an outstanding leader. He previously served two combat tours in the United States Marine Corps, and among many other achievements, was a VP at Schmidt Futures, a non-profit investment group focused on philanthropy for sciences.

At America’s Frontier Fund, our focus is in the creation of and investment in ventures at the cutting edge of technologies and innovation. One of the major thrusts of the fund is to help the United States maintain its world leadership in national security and technology competitiveness. We believe that leadership in the creation and advancement of new technology ventures is vital to our country.

How has natural language and virtual personal assistants missed or exceeded your expectations since you worked on Siri, the first commercial AI of its kind? 

Virtual personal assistants like Siri, Alexa, and Google Assistant are helping billions of people in their daily lives, and that is an incredible achievement. They help people answer questions, navigate, make calls, control smart devices, and even alert emergency services and family to an accident. I never would have dreamed that I might help create such value to humans around the world. But we are only at the beginning of natural language AI capabilities. And there has now been another fundamental technology breakthrough, generative AI, that we have just begun to see the results of.

I believe that Generative AI will lead to the next great wave of innovation in virtually every industry. There is a video that Apple made way back in 1987, called “Knowledge Navigator” that I often think about. The video at the time helped people envision what was possible with computers — to see beyond the applications of the day. It predicted the way that we might interface with a computer through a virtual assistant in the future. Many of the elements of the video are now possible through Generative AI.

Differentiation is a key part of startup success – do you agree or disagree that AI is being used too often as a blanket advantage or key selling point? Is AI a commodity or can it still provide a major advantage?

I agree wholeheartedly that AI is being treated as a key selling point. I remember a similar time in the late nineties, when ventures were seeing huge valuations just by adding a dot com to their names. Or later on, they would publish investor reports with the numbers of clicks and how many eyeballs they had access to. I think that many companies are hyping AI without having any real AI in their business. 

But Generative AI is real and happening now. Before it became widely available, it took a great deal of time, resources, and technological expertise to explore AI, let alone make it a part of your business. Spinning up an AI initiative or department was something that wasn’t feasible for most. Today, AI is ubiquitous, and companies without some implementation will suffer a great disadvantage. 

The important thing to remember is that your AI integration should always have a very specific purpose: how does it tie back into the need you’re addressing? How can you leverage that in concert with your other differentiators? 

You wrote recently about something called Pasteur’s Quadrant, which challenges the traditional linear process for tech transfer and advancement we’ve come to assume is unmovable. What do scientist-entrepreneurs need to understand about this new pathway?

I write and publish regularly on my public Substack, and send it out in a newsletter called “Your Venture Coach.” It is about trends, advice, and big concepts in the entrepreneurial and VC world. I want to help people, however I can, share my experience and help people achieve their successes.

Pasteur’s Quadrant breaks advancement of science and technology down into a simple matrix, based on pursuit of knowledge and consideration of use.  In the upper right quadrant is the image of Pasteur, this quadrant is known as “Pasteur’s Quadrant.” In this quadrant, researchers aim to explore the underlying principles and mechanisms of natural phenomena, while simultaneously seeking in parallel to develop practical applications or solutions to real-world problems. “Pasteur’s Quadrant” is characterized by the career of the great scientist who gave us both the germ theory of disease and the first engineered vaccines, and laid the foundations of microbiology.

So the point of Pasteur’s Quadrant is that the greatest opportunities will arise from simultaneously seeing practical applications to real-world problems while advancing science. It’s not about just advancing science, and then trying to figure out what the applications might be.

In regards to tech transfer, think of the huge amount of energy and time scientists and technologists spend creating and advancing technology and science: a career-spanning endeavor. What they are taught is to advance science — always keep things moving forward. When you make that big breakthrough, you publish a paper, maybe seek a patent, and sometimes license it. Otherwise, these brilliant people will continue to develop their science as they were educated to do. This doesn’t line up with how a business, let alone a venture, can be founded and run. 

The words “tech transfer” are misguided in and of themselves. A venture cannot simply hand technology down to the users and expect adoption. The problem starts with “considerations of use” as in Pasteur’s Quadrant. It is in identifying a market problem or pain point. Technology will enable the creation of a product which is a solution to the market problem. So the important innovation of the venture is the product, and the technology should effectively be invisible to the customer.

Why is jargon so dangerous in a venture context? And why is it so prevalent?

I am a very big proponent of something called, “The Heilmeier Catechism,” a core set of principles developed at DARPA. The catechism is a set of questions that they would subject all research projects to as a way of identifying their likelihood of success. The first is most relevant here: “What are you trying to do? Articulate your objectives using absolutely no jargon.” If you can’t do that, you don’t understand what you’re doing yet. This exercise sounds simple, but the reality is quite the opposite. 

If somebody says, “I'm going to take quantum computing and take these bits and create this new way of doing probability distributions,” it gives people a strong sense of complexity, but a low level of understanding and trust. Complexity is not the basis of creating breakthroughs. Understanding the simple way of explaining what something is, or a process being done — is crucial to success. Going back to the quantum example, if you hear that statement, your first inclination is to clam up. You’re afraid to ask questions, and you’re afraid to appear ignorant.

However, you should do the opposite: you should allow yourself to appear uninformed, or even stupid, because it's a superpower. The first reason is, you should place a high value on your own understanding, because it's the easiest way to learn and expand your knowledge. The second is that most people actually appreciate being asked questions, as it means you’re interested, listening, and gives them another reason to keep talking. But asking the most basic questions: what are you doing? What are your goals? How do you plan to achieve them? You would not believe the power that lies in these extremely simple questions.

Jargon can be convenient shortcuts for long ideas, like an acronym, but it more commonly fills the role of a closed language with the result of excluding or intimidating. I think that it's the completely wrong approach, and, as much as possible, we should try to make the complex more knowable. I've always been unable to just accept complexity and use it. I think my approach to this comes from my study of math. We had to solve all of these long and intense problems, but all of our work had to be shown in straightforward, step-by-step proofs. 

You’ve raised an incredibly entrepreneurial family. Were you intentional about that?

Thank you for your kind remark. I’m proud of all my three children, Hanne, David, and Peter. They each have enormous creativity and talent, and hold true to the highest human values. I attribute that to my Danish wife, Lisbeth. They all are choosing their own path in life. Lisbeth and I believe that parents should not try to influence what their children choose to do in life – except to encourage one thing: they should choose what they love, what they enjoy, what they care about, what they are passionate about. And only your children know what those things are; after all, it is their life.

I have also made many mistakes as a parent, for example focusing too much on their education when they were young. I am sure I did this – and way overdid it – because of my own experiences. Education was the way I was able to climb out of a massive family financial loss when I was 16, when my father, George Winarsky, died of a heart attack at the age of 54. 

His business collapsed and we lost everything. He had no life insurance, and the taxes due were so large that the IRS took our house, our car, and most everything else that my family owned. I ended up living with my mother on the second floor of my father’s only remaining office building in downtown Newark, NJ. I had a small space to live next to the stored photography equipment. I could not continue to live like that, and I left high school in my junior year. I knew I had to complete my college education, because if I didn’t, I would not even have a high school degree. I felt I had to race to finish college because there was so little money. So I also skipped my freshman year by passing several SATs.

My first year of college I was given a scholarship at Case-Western Reserve University, and then I transferred to The University of Chicago, which gave me a full scholarship. It was a fantastic education and I am forever indebted to them. I graduated from Chicago with a B.A., M.S., and Ph.D. in pure mathematics. I still don’t have a high school degree – which makes for a very funny discussion when I have to provide my transcript.

My education, very simply, let me change the path of my life. I wanted my children to have that same agency from receiving a great education, and I was too insistent on it. But I’m proud that my children have all arrived at doing something that they are passionate about. And they all did receive advanced degrees.

Our daughter Hanne always loved literature and poetry, and now she works as Head of Writer Acquisition & Development at Substack. We sometimes joke that our son David was born with a computer in his hand. He’s now a Director at Apple responsible for the team developing the voice of Siri. Our son Peter was always helping those who were less fortunate, and he is a VP of Product at Vida Health.

These were some of my wife’s and my priorities in raising our children:

• Try to give them unequivocal love
• Praise their kindness and their consideration of others
• Celebrate their successes – whether small or large
• Have an open house where friends and family are always welcome
• Help them grow self confidence and believe in themselves. On that note, I always wanted my children to think for themselves and feel that their opinions matter. Sometimes I would purposely disagree with them, just to give them the knowledge that they could disagree with their father. As parents, we are figures of great authority in their lives – but if our children are able to disagree with us, then they can believe in their own opinion and disagree with anyone in their life. 
• Encourage their creativity and their entrepreneurship. We always encouraged their new ideas, drawings, and made up stories. Nothing was crazy. 
• Help them understand that the world around them is still a great mystery, a small part of which they may try to help solve.
• Do your best not to overshadow your children. My wife has often commented to me: “under a great tree, nothing grows.”

  

Our three children now have a total of 7 children of their own, ranging from 12 years old to 2 years old, and I can’t wait to see the exciting lives that our grandchildren will lead as well.

For more great lessons from Norman Winarsky on science, entrepreneurship, and life, follow his substack and subscribe to his newsletter here.