This weekend I had the amazing opportunity to help organize and facilitate the first ever Quantified Self Conference in Mountain View, CA. The conference was attended by over 400 quantifiers, gadget & app makers, academics, hackers and personal scientists. I had the pleasure of wrangling 40 of them who had volunteered to share lessons learned from their self tracking experiments. I'm not going to spend a great deal of time and effort trying to recount all the content that was presented by these amazing people. Honestly, I didn't have much time to listen intently to what was being said and there are a lot of other attendees who have already done a much better job reporting from the conference than I ever could have:
Ethan Zuckerman's superb write-ups
I just want to express the thoughts and feelings that I've gleamed over the last 72 hours - to try and transfer the thought seeds into the soil and let the garden grow.
I volunteered for the QS conference because I really wanted to attend and I didn't have the funds to make it happen (oh grad school...). Thankfully Alexandra Carmichael responded and asked if I wanted to handle wrangling all the speakers for the conference. "Well that sounds easy", I thought to myself and quickly agreed. Little did I know that two weeks later I would be so deeply involved with making the conference a success though
Having late night IM chats and Google Doc editing sessions
Responding to over 100 emails from speakers in a 5 day span
Learning how to turn pdf files into PowerPoint presentations
Reassuring nervous speakers minutes before they were about to speak to 400 people
Was it hectic? Yes. Was it wonderful? Beyond wonderful. It was an eye opening experience. Having attending many academic conference I am used to a certain feel and it has never felt the way QS did. I can only attribute it to the overwhelming positivity that permeated through each talk, each exhibitor booth and each breakout session. From the minute I picked up my fellow breakout leader, Steven Dean, I don't think I witnessed a negative emotion. Each question was answered with a smile. Each little miscue was a laugh and an "Oh well." This may seem a little touchy-feely, but I really believe that the positive atmosphere helped shape not only the experience of attending, but also the experience of learning and sharing.
Thought 2: Research vs. Helping People
Gary led an amazing roundtable discussion about taking tracking projects and turning them into real business. Jason Jacobs (Fitnesskeeper), Brian Krejcarek (GreenGoose) and Ben Rubin (Zeo) spoke at length about the challenges and rewards to using the QS framework to grow and develop products and services that are helping people. Ben made a quick statement that really struck me when he was talking about science and experimentation within the context of his business. Basically, he promoted that idea that while research is important it ultimately doesn't provide the real value to users. What users want are systems that let them use them as they want so that they can make decisions and changes as they see it. It is about building a user experience on top of a device platform that empowers users - that helps them take control of their lives and make real change. Now, as an academic researcher I've been wrestling with this concept for a few years. I see the unmistakable power of well-designed clinical trials, but I also see where they are failing our population. In the research world it takes a year to go from concept to funded project and then who knows how long before results and knowledge are communicated to the public (and communication is a tricky subject for another day). Is it tedious and laborious work? Does it help people? Yes. But from what I took away from Ben's few sentences is the idea that we can do better by relying on commercial applications and start-up mentality (lean & agile) if we want to create real change in this world. Make it. Test it. Revise it. Repeat. I think the NIH would do well to listen to people like Ben Rubin if they really wanted to leverage the growing technology community to make our world a healthier place
Thought 3: Why are you making apps?
I "listened" to almost every single talk that was given outside of the breakout sessions and it seemed that in almost every session there were people talking about the apps they've made. Every time someone said they made an app it was usually mentioned about 4 or 5 slides into the presentation. Why? The app wasn't the focus for these people. Instead, it was the story behind why they wanted to make an app that tracked their mood or their bowel movements (really cool Crohn's disease tool). Each of the presenters had a clear personal investment, these apps helped them track something that was important to them, something that they felt passionately about. It was amazing to hear the power of their stories, to feel their pain (both physical and mental) and their joy as they went through the process of self-discovery. And then I read this tweet:
[person x] hanging around #qs2011 hints at how quickly this category is emerging as big and ripe for investment.
My immediate feeling was one of despair, "NO! keep your VC money out of our game." I truly believe that this field has the potential for greatness and throwing piles of money into this space won't fuel innovative ideas and creative answers to the grand challenges of today's world. The reason these people are successful, from RunKeeper to Quantter, is that behind each company is a person with a vision, with passion. They made devices and services because they needed them, because they wanted to help themselves and others. They didn't see a "market" and think, "This is where I make my first million." Now, I'm not a fool. I know each project needs money to survive, but I just wanted to throw this out there to all the potential investors that are looking at this space. Look for someone who is passionate first, someone who's spent the last month obsessing over scatterplots, someone who can tell you a story that moves you. Then when you've picked your jaw off the floor, and wiped away a tear write them a check. And for all you QS app makers. Please, please don't do this for the money. If you're passionate about what you're doing and you're working hard to help people then the money will come. If you don't trust me then maybe you'll trust this:
"Most successful founders are driven by impact rather than experience or money"
-From the Startup Genome Project
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