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George Polk, Founder and Chief Executive Officer, The Cloud Networks Limited, UK
1) Briefly tell us what it is about your company/project that makes it so special?
The Internet has changed all our lives, and people have become dependent on the power that access to the internet gives them. But the wired internet is only a taste of what will come – traditionally once they unplugged from their wired connection, they lost that power. Full broadband mobility is the next revolution that will change our lives. The mobile phone gave us freedom to roam, the blackberry has shown what reliable access to simple email can do, but both of those devices are only the tip of the iceberg. Pictures are worth a thousand words, music has immense raw power, words are often best spoken or illustrated – these and a host of other emerging broadband applications mean that increasingly we all need broadband to use the internet to its full potential, and that broadband will need to be mobile.
The Cloud is the largest operator of Wifi hotspots in Europe, but our network today is only the first step towards a larger, wide-area, indoor and outdoor broadband wireless network, made possible through our own deployments, through joining other networks together and by allowing private networks to join our Cloud. This Cloud is an open network, like the internet itself, open to any service provider, available for any (legal) service, providing a resource that innovators can use to get their products to their customers. The Cloud’s role is to build and manage this network for the good of anyone who wants to use it.
Beyond our network business, we operate an enabling business (Cloud Carrier Services) that helps companies like Skype bring innovative services to market, and an aggregation business (RoamPoint) which works to ensure that services available on the Cloud operate on other networks as well.
Behind these businesses is a philosophy that dedicates us to making the broadband internet wireless, surrounding our customers with it in a wider and wider range of locations, allowing people access to information and services in the way they have grown accustomed at school, work or home.
2) What country best facilitates starting a tech company? What single thing can a government do to encourage Technology Pioneers?
There are really three factors that allow entrepreneurs to take the risk of starting a tech company.
First, most importantly, and often overlooked as a factor, is the social culture. In the UK, US, Israel and China, for example, there is a social culture that allows people to take risk, fail and start again, encouraging people to strike out in new directions by mitigating the fear that they will never recover their careers or their reputations if stays out of the way. This is more important than often realized, because even if the government provides financial incentives, support programs or other help, often it is the opinion of one’s peers, family and society that matters the most. Anyone who starts a tech company has to be aware of the risk of partial or total failure, and if they come from a country where that would be the end of their career, they will be much more reluctant to innovate.
The second most important factor is labour market mobility. Young companies must be able to hire and fire more or less at will as it is impossible to predict the needs of the company as it grows, expanding in some areas and shrinking in others. We also operate in Germany and Sweden, and in these markets the more rigid labour market causes big problems in the early stages.
Third, there needs to be an active technology community, allowing innovators to raise capital, learn from each other, and benefit from great academic institutions.
Other than keeping tax rates low, allowing the issuance of stock options in a way that aligns the employees interests with the company but doesn’t impose a big immediate price on making people owners, and structuring capital gains tax so equity and stock option risk is well rewarded if all goes well, I don’t think that financial incentives or tax incentives work very well. Either they subsidize things that would have gotten done anyway by another means or they are exploited by professional speculators who use the pools of capital created by, for example, VCTs in the UK, to distort the market and make it
harder
for real innovators to thrive.
However, given the importance of these three factors, there is no question that the US and Israel remain far and away the best incubators for a tech company. In both, you have a culture of risk, a fluid labor market and lots of role models. The UK does pretty well, while other countries in Europe lag.
3) What makes an innovator?
It’s an odd combination of someone who is willing to think out of the box but does so having carefully learned the lessons that are inside the box. Innovation is not usually a reckless process; risks must be calculated, reasoned and sustainable. Even the most visionary innovator will face difficult times, and in those times, he or she will need the comfort of knowing that his or her assumptions are based on fact. An innovator’s innovation, if you will, is to believe that within the framework of facts and current reality, the edges of the envelope can be pushed back and new and previously unforeseen things can happen.
4) How does your company directly contribute to improving the state of the world?
Ultimately the excitement of our business is that we enable a vastly wider range of people to have access to a huge community – of people, knowledge and experiences. This breaks down barriers created by fear, ignorance and frustration. Even at its most apparently trivial our business creates bridges of great value. For example, Nintendo runs a global online gaming service over our network which allows kids in Manchester to build relationships with kids in Tokyo – which is bound to create a foundation for greater international understanding. But the social value of our business will also grow as more and more disadvantaged communities gain the benefit of lower cost, high value portable broadband networks.
5) What value do you hope to gain from being a Technology Pioneer?
Our business depends on partnership with a range of others – equipment providers, application providers, content providers and groups of users – and one of our greatest investments has been in building new coalitions to bring new services into being. Through our work with the WEF, we hope to strengthen these relationships, as well as learn from others how to increase the speed and effectiveness of innovation in the space. Personally, as a “professional” or serial entrepreneur, I value the opportunity to learn from others who have been through this process from different angles.
Finally, as someone also involved in a wide range of political and social causes, I am looking forward to meeting others who balance profit and non-profit work. Prior to founding my current business, I created a network called the Catalyst Group which encouraged a small group of 50 prominent and successful 35-45 year olds to get more deeply engaged in confronting and resolving significant social, political, environmental and cultural problems. Personally, I am most deeply involved in conflict resolution in the political arena and global warming and other environmental crises in the non-profit realm, and I am looking forward to seeing again or for the first time some of leading experts in these fields.
The value for both my commercial and social interests in taking five days to explore issues that I rarely now have the time to think about is particularly exciting.
6) What do you think the role of technology should be in society?
I feel very strongly that technology must be placed at the service of people, not the other way around -- the challenge for society is to stop technology from overwhelming our core values. But even to the biggest sceptics, it is clear that as a force for positive growth and change, technology is immensely powerful.
An example: my sister is deaf, and the advent of the internet and particularly video conferencing has changed her life from a narrow life where her ability to build a local community was limited to other deaf people who knew sign language who happened to live near her. She can now “speak” using sign language to friends all around the world, and lives in many ways a more internal life than me. She can find new friends with shared interests, concerns, constraints, hopes and fears, and as a result she feels like a much fuller member of society. Networks like the Cloud’s allow her carry this crucial communications experience outside of her home, so she can (and does) set up her laptop with a webcam where-ever she might be and have long and animated conversations with a close friend in Japan, all at negligible cost.
Her challenge, and in many ways the challenge we all face, is not to let the utility of that new community supplant her equally important interest in her local community where she must also play an active role in her children’s school, her neighbour’s lives, etc. So, technology’s role must be to build new richness in our lives, but not take away or replace the richness we had before.
7) What is the right balance in society between scientific interest and ethical concerns?
I have the luxury of operating in a field where the ethical choices are quite clear, and so I would say that ethical concerns have absolute priority in all aspects of any job I have done. In a previous business, I was intimately involved in reforming the criminal justice system through the outsourcing of some supervisory functions that were normally in the hands of government. There were times when we could have made more profit at the expense of the criminals under supervision – and the choice was always easy to give up money to maintain our ethical credibility. I do not envy those operating in fields such as medical research, biotechnology or genetic engineering, where it is not always easy to know what is ethically “correct.” But leaving aside the challenge of understanding what is the correct thing to do, it is imperative that we all actively strive to be ethically correct, which means not only that we “do the right thing” but that we actively question what we do in the light of what is in the best interest of society as a whole rather than focus only on our own narrow commercial interests.
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