4 Special Feature Technology
How will Silicon Valley — the home of technology — change in the next decade? Rituparna Chatterjee asked
10 accomplished Silicon Valley Indians to present their vision for 2020. Their insights and predictions
Silicon Valley, 10 Years On
The Grand Veterans
The grand old men of the Valley who have been there, done that
The New Detroit
Silicon Valley's primary ecosystem of
cooperation and trust — if you leave a
company to form your own, nobody
sues you — will not change. The defi-
nition of a multinational will change.
We will see ‘micro-multinationals’
flourishing. For instance, earlier, GM
produced cars made in USA for USA.
In the next decade, you will have your
corporate office in one place, manu-
Vish Mishra facturing elsewhere, R&D in yet an-
Global Head, The other country, while your market
Vinod Khosla Indus could be completely elsewhere. While
the multinational, as we have known
Entrepreneurs; it, was a large company, micro-multi-
Co-founder, Sun , Microsystems; Venture Director, nationals could include both behe-
Founder Khosla Ventures ClearStone moths and smaller companies.
Venture Partners Smaller companies would follow the
10 Googles same logic.
Silicon Valley is going to be the new
Detroit; not in the bad sense, but in be-
In Energy ing a hub of future automotive tech-
Nothing we know about energy will be
relevant 10 years from now. Biofuels will
get incredibly cheaper. Our view of so-
From Businesses To Consumers
lar and wind energies will be very differ- The last few decades of technology inno-
ent. Technologies to store these energies vations in areas such as microproces-
will become more important than solar sors, databases, PCs and networking
and wind themselves. Compared to in- were largely about helping businesses
formation and telecommunications, en- improve their processes. But now, inno-
ergy is a bigger challenge, but also a big- vations in technology are about improv-
ger opportunity. ing and changing the lives of consumers.
Over the next two decades, there will The current wave of consumer technol-
be 10 or more Googles in the energy ogy innovations will continue in the
space. All these ideas we have today Rob Chandra next decade. And while these technolo-
about going green -- including the gies — mobile, cloud and social -- will
gamut of irrational green-lifestyle Partner at continue to connect consumers to peo-
books -- will become irrelevant. Bessemer Venture ple around the world, the local focus will
Extrapolating the past will not solve the Partners become increasingly paramount.
world's grand challenges. We need to in- Because when you go out for a dinner or
vent the future we want, and that means need a hair cut, all of your information
bold, radical ideas that reasonable peo- and social needs are local. Soon, there
ple will deem as being unreasonable. will be over 5 billion smart phone users,
Moore’s Law Will Slow Down Considerably
Semiconductors will get commoditised the 2020s will focus more on leveraging
and lose their magic. Unlike now, any- existing science and technology to deliv-
body will be able to make them. er convenience to consumers.
Traditional Silicon Valley industries like When it comes to replacements for tra-
semiconductors and networking would
have matured and will see far fewer deals.
ditional semiconductors, the 2020s will
see more research in biochips -- using
Vinod Dham Moore's Law will slow down consider- proteins as a fundamental base to store
Father of the
ably, driven by economics — building information. But nanotechnology, which
fabs is enormously expensive. Also tech- is fantastic for other things, cannot re-
Pentium chip; nologically, because once you reach sub- place traditional semiconductors in con-
Founding Managing nanometre levels, managing the noise-to- sumer devices, at least not in the next
Director at Indo-US signal ratio becomes extremely
challenging, and is incredibly difficult to
decade. Traditional Silicon Valley behe-
moths like Cisco, HP and Oracle will
Venture Partners
yield perfect results every time. have to battle huge challenges. As every-
Unlike earlier decades, the next one will thing becomes a service, they will move
not be so much about fundamental into consulting and services. They have
changes in materials or science. Instead, hardware patents; so, they can package
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nologies like electric vehicles, fuel-cell
vehicles, smarter vehicles and the in-
frastructure around these.
Silicon Valley's cloud computing will
change the traditional Indian IT busi-
ness model. Everything — applica-
tions, infrastructure, platforms and so
on — will be a service. So, it will be very
fast and easy to develop an app, unlike
in old IT. So, Indian IT companies will
have to constantly update their staff
with the latest technologies and change
their business models to adapt.
The total capital in venture capital
will rise enormously. A lot more phi-
lanthropy will come out of Silicon
Valley. It has relatively new wealth and
so the models will differ from the phil-
anthropic models of old wealth — say,
in the way The Rockefeller Foundation
differs from The Bill & Melinda Gates
Foundation.
all connected to each other on a broad-
band network. We are just starting to
imagine this future. We will all be mired
in data! And the next decade will be all
about figuring out new technologies to
help us get the information we want and
make the decisions we need.
The dramatic consolidation of venture
capital will continue. In spite of in-
creased bootstrapping, and new software
innovations with which entrepreneurs
can launch Internet businesses very
quickly with just a few thousand dollars,
venture capital will remain important.
This is because scaling the venture still
requires lots of capital, and a failure to
raise it at the right time makes it easier
for competition to zoom ahead.
their services in a more compelling way
than, say, an Infosys or TCS can. And
this is why Indian IT behemoths too will
be challenged: they will have to figure
out how to compete with these Valley be-
hemoths. Intel, too, has a different chal-
lenge — of dealing with disruptive tech-
nologies like mobile. The mega-world
challenges Silicon Valley solves will
have to do less with IT and more with life
sciences. Tremendous changes in the
way medicine is practiced — as we apply
genetics to correcting and fixing dis-
eases — will increase lifespan.
The challenges Silicon Valley itself will
face in the 2020s will be more around pol-
icy and regulation.
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ARINDAM
The Behemoths
They drive the Valley’s traditional behemoths
Next Decade Will be Video Era
The next decade will be the video
era. We will go beyond voice, to
communicate via video. Mobility,
not using it all day. Sensor net-
works will sense these needs and
adapt accordingly. So, we will
social and cloud will change have intelligent highways, intelli-
everything, but it will happen gent traffic monitors, intelligent
through video. Consequently, net- cars, intelligent homes.
works too will change. In the pre- Therefore, wastage will reduce as
vious decade, networks were all we use our resources efficiently.
about moving information from Thus, in emerging economies, vir-
point A to point B. In the 2020s, tual healthcare, rural banking
networks will also be about deliv- and government will be disrupted
ering a smoother, seamless expe- in prominent and revolutionary
rience and all kinds of network ways. Of course, all this disrup-
will co-exist. Networks will be tion will start here, in Silicon
like smart grids. In a grid, sensor Valley. Take Facebook. Here is a
Padmasree Warrior networks transmit small bits of Valley tech that is changing how
data all day long. In video, on the groups get together and you could
Chief Technical other hand, you have very hi-defi- argue that it's also changing how
Officer, Cisco nition data in a burst, but you are younger generations learn.
Search Will Go Everything Will
Natural Be Connected
Prith
Amit Singhal
Google Fellow Banerjee
who rewrote the Senior VP-
search engine Research at HP
Distinctions between devices will go away. We In the 2020s, everything will be tracked and
will be surrounded by technology more than traced in the world of information. This is be-
ever before, but it will not be intrusive. It will be cause everything will be connected. Doctors and
natural. Search will go natural. Not only will it nurses will be able to monitor everything you do
be personal, but more normal ways of search- in healthcare, based on you tweeting your emo-
ing — through images or voice — will emerge. tions and through the chips you wear on your
The 2020s situation would be something like hand, which will convey, via the cloud, to doc-
this: you are sitting with your family at the din- tors sitting in the office whether your BP, for in-
ner table and quizzing your kids, say, on how stance, went up. This is why sensors will be cru-
Alfred Nobel made his money. Instead of hunt- cial. So much so that in the 2020s, HP could be
ing for answers under the table on your smart selling you ‘sensing as a service’, similar to to-
phone, you will simply ask, “Hey Google, how day's ‘software as a service’. Rather than buying
did Nobel make his fortune?”, as if Google was a random device, you will buy the solution. We
another person sitting with you. And it will an- will have multiple sources of energy, which,
swer just as if it was. Technology will solve when used in the most efficient combinations,
some of the problems that technology itself has will create sustainable, zero-carbon data cen-
created. Take cloud. The power of the cloud is
what gives a device its real power, but network-
tres. We waste a lot of energy. But instead of
spending energy in cooling the entire room, we
ing and network capability is a bottleneck. could cool the spot you are sitting on.
The New Wave
The new voices changing the face of the Valley
DNA’ll Be Written Like Code
Two industries will fundamental- tech company like Google, rather
ly change Silicon Valley and, than a biotech company. This is
thereby, the global hi-tech land- because we are able to now search
scape: aerospace and genetics, information about a person's
both of which are ripe now. We health, analyse that data, draw
will start to have customised patterns and prescribe drugs ac-
drugs for each person. Genome se- cordingly. So really, it becomes a
quencing is giving us break- data problem rather than a drug
throughs. We are also learning problem. People will be able to
how individuals react to drugs. write DNA, much like we write Naveen Jain
That plus all the data we have code today. NASA budget cuts do
about individuals today could rev- not mean the end of the space
Serial Entrepreneur
olutionise healthcare. Drug re- era, but the beginning of the pri- (Moon Express &
search might now come from a hi- vatisation of space. Intellius)
Booms & Busts The Product
Will Be Faster Will Find You
Vivek Anand
Wadhwa Rajaraman
Serial Entrepreneur- Founding Partner,
turned-Academic Cambrian Ventures
This will be the most innovative time in history. It is hard to think of an industry that will
Everything -- software, storage, medicine and not get disrupted by data. Everything will
even applications of Moore's Law -- is changing. be personalised based on data about you.
Silicon Valley will not change much, but its Just as highways changed retail 50 years
technologies will. Similarly, with valuations. ago and the Internet changed retail 20
The social media bubble will burst in the next 6-
12 months. But other bubbles will replace it: ed-
ucation and data are next. Rather than fo-
years ago, social and mobile together will
revolutionise retail in the 2020s. E-com-
merce today is bringing the store to the
cussing on the world's grand challenges, Silicon
Valley is focussing on Mickey Mouse social, ob-
web. In the next decade, it will be about
bringing the web to the store. Instead of
sessing over Groupon and Twitter. The best en- you finding the product, the product will
trepreneurs are here and this is a waste of the find you. Mass marketing will be passé
Valley's talent. The magic about Silicon Valley and marketing will be data-driven. Data
is that it keeps going through the cycle of de- will drive gaps left by traditional VC
struction and growth. The booms and busts will firms, thereby reducing the chances of
be faster now. hyped valuations and bubbles.