Tim O Reilly
The closing Keynote on Day 1 by Tim O Reilly and the VC Panel on Day 2 were the two sessions I was really looking forward to at the PaypalX Innovate conference.
Tim O Reilly is an incredibly brilliant man. He is an ideas person, who continually grows, blends and morphs his ideas. His ability to learn from everything he watches is what makes him who he is. He is soaking up, everything, at every minute. I felt just so incredibly lucky to watch him talk, just from a few feet away.
Tim is a perfect combination of human and brilliance. Seeing him swell with pride as he shared a picture of his daughter and grandchild in the context of face recognition software was just a beautiful reflection of who Tim is as a person.He continued to talk about how he watches his grandson explore everything with his hands – his feeling and sensory world – much like the applications and devices of today.
Tim also referred to the Internet Operating System – that gets better as more and more people use it. An operating system that belongs to the masses. He said that open platforms are important at a time of the internet operating system alluding to services provided by Google such as street to street navigation being immensely helpful.
Finally, Tim spoke about the paradox of all open platforms. Platforms all start out to give power to the masses. Google, facebook, myspace …all platforms. But as the platforms get bigger and bigger, are they really giving power to the masses or is the platform becoming a threat? Tim talked about this fear for the future. While Open Platforms are about redistribution of power, it is unclear where they will all end up.
So it is with Paypal. As much as Paypal X is much needed to create opportunity and innovation in the payments space, where will this finally lead? Not so sure. But for now, it is all good.