Silicon Valley Summers...

The SV Visionary Awards used to be my favorite Silicon Valley summer event. These were small gatherings maybe a 150 people, usually held in the substantial backyards of some incredible Woodside mansion — but always with incredible iconic names standing just a few feet away. 

This casual atmosphere made for excellent conversations and excellent contact building for future news stories. Strangely, there was always very little media at this event -- which I never understood because the access to key Silicon Valley figures was off the charts. 

The backyard-casualness of the event was very welcoming coming after the massive Silicon Valley conferences during the rest of the year.

It also made it feel that Silicon Valley is really like a small village. We quickly get used to seeing people that in the rest of the world are considered unapproachable stars and geniuses -- influencing people on a massive scale.

The world looks to Silicon Valley for visionaries and as an example of a global engine of innovation. Now it's changing into the global engine for scaling a business.

Scaling a business is Silicon Valley's specialty now because because these days every company has the tools to be a tech company and innovation can happen anywhere. Growing a business quickly is hugely important for digital business because you have a first-to-scale chance to dominate your sector.

Bricks and clicks is no longer a viable strategy. Bricks took years to build a business which meant incumbent companies had time to adjust to any successful competitor and get a strategy.

Clicks allow you to scale in days... on demand. And e-commerce markets are quickly dominated by a single major platform unlike in the bricks world where many competitors can co-exist.

The COVID-19 crisis has compressed this trend, and many others. It has brought the future closer and faster. And it's also brought closer the problems of the future.

How do we deal with job losses for no fault of the workers? What is fair GIG economy legislation? How do we deal with rising inequality and poor educational outcomes?

AI pioneer and author Jaron Lanier asked "Who owns the Future?" in his excellent book of the same name. But the future is about who has a say -- not ownership. I don't own my apartment but I have a say in how I live in it.

We need to decide on what type of future we want to live in, band how to best share in the abundance created by our manufacturing prowess rather than the artificial scarcities created to bolster markets.

We think of technology as the driver of a trend and we often write about it in that way. But an engine doesn't drive a car. It's the human drivers that decide the destination. Technology will get us into a great future society -- if we know where we are going.

We have very challenging societal problems -- initiated by our technologies -- that would have taken years to solve because they would have taken years to fully develop.

For example, the newspaper industry has been in decline for nearly two decades yet print-based advertising and printed newspapers continued to be produced. That's not the case now -- many news organizations won't survive into 2021.

The extraordinary circumstances of the COVID-19 crisis has brought future societal problems into sharper focus and requiring a faster timeline to reach resolution.

I wish us all luck in this endeavor because we'll need it. We change slowly -- no matter how fast the world turns.