Hi. I’m Nick O’Connor. I live in Pacific Grove, California, and I’ve spent my career working out what makes new technology actually succeed.
I was born in Galway, Ireland, and studied physics at University College Galway. I was partway through my master’s when Applied Materials hired me, and I moved to Silicon Valley.
I spent my first few years at Applied Materials as a field engineer, travelling the world installing the Endura 5500 in semiconductor fabs. It turned out to be the most successful semiconductor equipment product ever built. We could not make them fast enough and the customers loved them. That was the first time I was on a team with real product-market fit, and the first time I watched a technology go from new to everywhere, from close range, with my hands on it.
After Applied Materials I did an MBA at UC Berkeley. Three things from it stuck and I still use all three: Steve Blank on customer development, from The Four Steps to the Epiphany; Nassim Taleb on the consequences of rare events, from The Black Swan; and Philip Tetlock on how well anyone can actually predict anything.
I then worked for a number of early-stage startups in Silicon Valley. More crashed and burned than made it, but I did get to feel the excitement and the chaos of product-market fit again, from the inside. All the time learning what separates the ones that work from the ones that don’t, and that the reality of starting a new business is messy. Very messy, and chaotic. Blank’s customer development process and Taleb’s narrative fallacy can both be true at the same time. I wrote about that here.
I also worked as a product manager inside large organisations, at the AT&T Foundry in Palo Alto and at Rakuten. That taught me the pros and cons of trying to innovate inside a big company against doing it in a small one. Having bounced between the two, Paul Graham’s line rings true: “Running a startup is like being punched in the face repeatedly, but working for a large company is like being waterboarded.” I wrote about that here.
Then I got the opportunity to run an innovation program at a Fortune 500 company in the valley, built on frameworks and methodologies out of Stanford and the National Science Foundation. Then I turned that into a business: 36 programs for Fortune 500 companies over eight years, at locations all over the world. Each program ran three or six months, with up to twelve startups in it. Somewhere around 250 startups, watched closely at the point where it becomes clear whether a thing is going to work or not. I documented every single one, looking for patterns, learning as much as I could about what works and what doesn’t. I wrote about that here.
What I think is happening
I find it useful to look at AI the way you look at the history of electricity. I wrote about that here. There is a world before it and a world after it, and everyone is going to have it. We are early enough that what you mostly see is people adopting AI into their existing ways of doing things. What I am interested in is the other move, where people and businesses adapt to what AI actually is and use it natively. Once electricity existed, why would you do any work without it? AI will look the same, in hindsight.
The new scarce skill is being able to say what you actually want, at high fidelity. Not coding. Not prompting. Most people can’t do it. Most business leaders can’t either. The ones who figure it out are going to see benefits an order of magnitude beyond the people who don’t. To understand why, it helps to compare living your life and running your business with electricity and without it.
What I want out of this: to work with people and business leaders who want to adapt to the new AI capabilities and create massive value and abundance for themselves and their customers. The value it can hand one person is unparalleled, and it’s almost completely misunderstood at the moment. Enormous and misunderstood at once is what an opportunity looks like.