“good artists copy, great artists steal”, Picasso (*)
“are you a hippie or nerd?“
Open letter to colleagues from the Stanford online course (Technology Entrepreneurship, BWS – Business World Strategy Group – 2013)
I would like to share with you about my new company which I believe has some ideas discussed in our BWS group.
Our goal is to become a company developing software and manufacturing equipment in Brazil.
We have an agreement with partner from China, for technology development and as commercial representation in Brazil and all Latin America.
The brand:
I made a fusion and adaptation between the company name suggested by Yan and the brand created by Raul, plus the idea ‘well safe’ of investors and friends, and added to my vision and synthesis in three words of the frontier of science and technology in XXI century: Bits, Genes and Atoms.
Bits: the evolution of electronic engineering.
Genes: the evolution of biology and genetic engineering.
Atoms and Molecules: the evolution of chemical engineering.
You may say, limited vision, perhaps, can be, I see no problem with it, because the ““the Future is uncertain…. but this uncertainty is at very heart of human creativity”, but let me be clear, it´s my vision and I stand by that.
As I say at the conclusion of the cover letter of the company: (…) We believe and use in practice and as a principle, the most sophisticated technology in the universe: human being relationships.
I would like to thank all of you and to give a special thanks to Raúl Peralta Diaz and Yan Franzini. To Yan, because from “BWS – Business World Strategy” it was where I started to adapt my company name, and to Raúl, because his creation and design was very inspiring to me.
Best wishes for all,
Oswaldo Conti-Bosso – Engineering of ideas and social ties relationships
Oswaldo Conti-Bosso
(*) Steve Jobs interview, 1995 (parte 1/5):
Speech-free translation:
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(…) You know, ultimately it comes down to taste, it comes down to taste, its it comes down to trying to expose yourself to the best thing that humans have done and then try to bring those things into what you are doing.
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Picasso had saying, he said; “good artists copy; great artists steals”.
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We have you know; always; I am shameless about stealing great ideas and I think of part of what made macintosh great was that the people working on it were musicians and poets and artists and zoologists and historians who also happened to be the best computer scientist in the world.
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But if it hadn’t been for computer science these people have all been you know doing amazing things in life in the field and they brought with them we all brought to this to this effort up a very liberal arts, …., I am liberal arts attitude that we want to pollen the best we saw in these other fields into this field and I am I don´t think you get that if you are very narrow…
– One other question I asked everyone in the series was are you a hippie or nerd?
Oh if I had to Pick one of these two is clearly hippie, yeah it that, for all the people I work with were clearly in that category too, yeah,…., well ask yourself what is a hippie, I miss in a word as a lotta connotations but to me you know because I grew up so remember that the sixties happened in the early seventies right we have to remember that story when I had aged so I saw a lot this and a lot happened right in our backyard here and so to me the spark of that, that there was something beyond serve what you see every day there is something going on here in life beyond Just a job in a family and two cars in the garage in a career, there something more going on there is another side to the coin that we don´t talk about and we experience the wonders gaps Just a really when everything is not ordered in perfect when this kind a gap experience this in Russia or something and a lot of people have set off throughout history find out what that was and whether it is a role or whether it is you know some Indian mystics whatever might be and the hippie movement got a little bit of that and they wanted to find out what that was about and that life was not about what they saw their parents and the pendulum swung too far the other way it was crazy but there was a German something here and it is the same thing that causes people to want to be poets instead bankers, you know, and I think that is a wonderful think and I think that same spirit can be put into products and its products can be manufactured and given to people making sense that spirit if you talk to people use the Macintosh they will love it you don´t hear people loving things products very often really but you can feel it and there was something really wonderful, so I don´t think that most that the really best people that I have work with have work with computers for the sake working with computers they work with computers because they are the medium the best capable of transmitting some feeling that you have that you want to share with other people, does that make any sense to you? And you know, before they invented these things that all these people did other things, but computers were invented and they did come along and all these people did get interested in school before school and said Hey this is the medium that I think I can say something, you know?
