Shane Curran is building a product you probably won’t understand, for a customer that almost certainly isn’t you, insuring you against a downside you probably can’t see. And you absolutely need to know more about his company, Evervault, because in a way the story of Evervault is the story of the Irish tech scene.

Chances are high you’re reading this on a smartphone. Chances are equally high you’ve read about encryption, security, and privacy, and chances are you didn’t understand what it was all about. You’re not stupid. Encryption is just very technical, very complicated, and very niche. It’s so technical, complicated, and niche the people making the apps on your smartphone aren’t all that aware of it.

Evervault makes it easy for the developers of apps and software of all kinds to plug next-level encryption in. What Stripe does for payments – abstract you from the true complexity of the payment problem – Evervault does for encryption. This is no joke. The more secure we are, the safer our data are, the safer we’ll all be, as the volume of data expands around us at ever-increasing speeds. The market for Evervault is truly enormous.

Evervault put itself on the map with its seed round in October 2019 of $3.2 million. It wasn’t the amount of money that was eyecatching, but the calibre of investors in the round which was led by Sequoia, but also included Kleiner Perkins and Irish venture capital firms Frontline. In May 2020, Evervault followed up with a $16 million round led by Index Ventures, and a bunch of angel investors include Dylan Field, chief executive of Figma, Kevin Hartz, cofounder of Eventbrite, and Alex Stamos, a former chief security officer with Facebook.

Shane and I spoke recently. We started at a very broad angle – the nature of objective truth – and got into what Evervault is, where it came from, the problem it solves, and what’s next for the company. We talk about the different worlds of starting up and scaling companies. We talk about start-ups and start-up culture in Dublin, what simple policy fixes Ireland can do to ensure it is a welcoming place for founders to build their intellectual property in Ireland, and we end discussing the evolution of the higher education system, what it can do to help founders succeed, and what might, just might, come next.

You’ll see we mention a lot of books in this conversation. Shane is well read, thoughtful, and there’s a right bang of the future off him. I confess I bought every book he recommends.

You can listen to the full conversation on our audio platform as a podcast. Enjoy the conversation, I’m pretty sure there is going to be another quite soon.

*****

Encryption and objective truth

Stephen Kinsella (SK): I want to start off with a nice, easy question to you. Is there such a thing as objective truth?

Shane Curran (SC): That’s an easy one. Yes, if something is an obvious truth, then it probably is. So, I take the formal logic stance on it, but I would say yes.

SK: The reason I’m asking you sort of a wide broad question is that if there’s such a thing as objective truth, in the two plus two equals four sense, then there’s probably such a thing as, objectively speaking, privacy and not privacy.

Which leads us immediately into the reason for Evervault existing. And I’m interested in Evervault for a number of reasons, not just how innovative it is, etc., but the idea of it, which is I’ll let you explain to people, but the idea of providing a sounder foundation for privacy and security.

SC: Sure. I guess I’ll caveat the explanation by saying that we build for builders in the sense that although personal privacy is the end goal, the best way of getting there is by building tools for software developers who tend to work at companies, but they could be processing anything that’s personally identifiable or that is just sensitive personal data as well as commercial sensitive data. So, there is a little bit of everything. But I think drawing a line from the privacy angle makes a lot of sense.

At Evervault, we build encryption infrastructure for developers. And encryption is probably the most important tool in cyber security and keeping information secret. But it’s also one of the most frankly confusing and easy things to get wrong. The basic idea is that you have data, and you have a key, and you use mathematics to be able to take the sensitive information, encrypt it using a key, and then whoever controls the key is the only person has access to the data itself. And cryptography, or encryption in general, is definitely one of these sort of ‘Wild Wests’, especially on the Internet, where it’s very easy to try to learn it.

And every time you go online and ask a question about encryption, you get about 20 people coming back to you saying that if you don’t understand you shouldn’t be learning it and so on. So, it’s definitely full of gatekeeping, which is something I’ve never been particularly impressed by or interested in.

But Evervault is effectively the gateway that keeps your sensitive data safe from the inside world and prying eyes.

SK: One of the things that I find exciting about this is the fact it’s not a question of it being 98 per cent secure to 99 per cent secure. You’re moving from a zero point, for most people, to something which is a huge, huge leap. And I like the fact that, in a certain sense, the idea of the product is to abstract away from the complexity. It’s like saying that the value that you’re delivering your customers is saying, ‘we will take care of that thing for you. Relax, we’ve got this. You plug this in and you’re grand. Now you can get on with doing your thing, whatever your service happens to be.’ I really like that as an idea because as an end user, as a sort of a non-technical person, what you need to do when you’re using the Internet is to have trust in everything you do.

Interestingly, one of the first things I did as a researcher was to compare prices of CDs across different points that you buy CDs on the Internet. But the idea was, objectively speaking, that there should be no difference in prices in a totally flat market between a Megadeth CD on CD Baby or Amazon. But there was a price difference. And the question was why, and the answer was trust. You were willing to buy off these companies because you trusted that they would, if your CDs didn’t arrive or if your stuff got robbed or if your credit card got hacked, they would simply compensate you. So, there was an increasing return, in fact, to increasing levels of trust, which I think is one of the weird human pieces of the infrastructure of the Internet that seems to be lost. But it seems that Evervault is trying to bring in.

SC: Yeah, exactly. And I think with encryption in particular, a lot of people tend to focus on it purely from the lens of keeping data invisible. But one of the other great advantages of it is this idea of integrity. So, for example, if you’re logging into your online banking and I’m sending a €1,000 bank transfer to you, although it’s obviously an issue if somebody was able to intercept that and see that I was sending €1,000 to you, a bigger issue would be somebody going in changing the recipient and changing the amount of the transaction itself. And that’s one of the other sort of unspoken advantages of encryption that tends to kind of fall by the wayside. It’s sort of the idea of making things tamper proof as well as invisible. So, it’s definitely a pretty robust tool for the most part.

But you’re right in saying that I think most encryption work these days is sort of going from the 98 per cent secure to 99 per cent secure, and they’re these sort of turf wars between different schools of encryption and different ways of doing it in academic papers and so on.

But the sad truth is, most companies just don’t do any encryption at all. So even if they were to go on to a mediocre secure scheme from the 1970s or 1980 that’s still in order rather than people arguing about whether they should use a longer key size because quantum computers or something might come along in a few years and potentially break it. So yeah, you’re right in that most people aren’t tackling that kind of obvious low hanging fruit, which is just getting people to use encryption in general.

And that’s less of a technical problem. Although we have a bunch of really challenging technical problems. It’s actually more of a communication problem and it’s just about building a really nice developer experience that’s sort of magical, to use one of those terms that’s thrown around quite liberally these days.

Lessons and learnings

“As an Irish person, I think we’ve always been quite cynical of ourselves.”

SK: Yeah. I think the bar that Apple and places like Stripe have set is that it just has to work, and it has to feel delightful as you do it.

Can I ask you, beyond the technical and beyond the product, what is it like to build a company? I’ve never done anything like that. It sounds fascinating.

You didn’t last long in college, but I don’t think that has held you back. How have you found building your company? What have you learned along the way?

SC: That’s a big question. I’m still figuring it out. I don’t think anybody really knows how to build a company because every company is very different.

For context, I started Evervault as sort of a research project maybe four or five years ago, focusing purely on the sort of fringe of encryption where people are worried about the 98 to the 99 per cent. But one of the things I realised is just that learning to use encryption at all is very difficult. Seeing that first hand, I quantifiably say that six months my life was not wasted in this case, but certainly invested in something that shouldn’t have taken that long. I think the first part of building a company that it is super important is to just deeply understanding the problem space that you’re working in. But I won’t dwell too much on that cause that’s just sort of cookie cutter advice that most people answer when you ask somebody how to start a company.

The biggest thing from my perspective that I think is both enjoyable, but also extraordinarily difficult is just team composition and just alignment on a singular thing. Most companies just do too much stuff at the same time. And inspired by some Silicon Valley writing, if you just focus on exactly one thing, and especially one very simple thing, you’re much more like to succeed at it.

So, I think one of the best things that we did in the early days of Evervault, not me but the very early team, was just distilling everything that we’re doing down to its simplest form, because I think people don’t fully appreciate how quickly you have to grow and how frequently new people join the company until you actually go and do it. And this is specifically for internet venture-backed companies.

It’s not necessarily the same for other companies, but if you have a person joining every week, the onboarding time, the sort of time and complexity it actually takes to understand and get up to speed with what we’re actually doing in the first place is immense.

And I think more and more companies should just distil what they do down to a page. And ideally, people would actually know that before they join the day-to-day. And I think that kind of feeds into sort of a strong bragging culture that we have, which is, to your point about me not going to university, kind of ironic because we have a somewhat academic culture to a certain degree, but it’s academics with deliverables. No offence to anybody in academia.

SK: None taken.

SC: It’s like a super powerful thing. I think if you combine those two things, and obviously the best researchers in university do it, and I’m sure you do it as well.

So just combining those two things like distilling things down and just making them as easy as possible for people to understand and digest is super powerful but sounds like a thing that most companies do, but frankly, they don’t. Critical thinking is one of the most powerful things that a founding team can do.

SK: I’m struck by the violence of my agreement with everything that you said. I particularly like the idea of writing down almost like a manifesto, which I have done on several projects. And it’s actually worked fairly well, because when you are faced with a decision later on about whether we go left or do we go right, you can actually point back to this document and say, ‘no, this is what we said we were trying to do, and it’s neither left nor right.’ It does provide a certain touch point.

I’m also struck by the fact that while Evervault is obviously an international company now, you’re still based in Dublin. You’re still doing your thing in the Irish tech scene. How has that evolved in a couple of years that you’ve been building Evervault? I am struck with the fact that when I speak to people like yourself, the idea of Dublin as a satellite campus of Silicon Valley seems to be getting less. You still need to go there, but there’s no sense that 10 or 15 years ago, you would have had to have gone out of the city to go to Silicon Valley to sort of become successful there.

It seems like it’s possible to do it in Dublin and therefore in Ireland. I’m wondering, what are your thoughts around that?

SC: Yeah. So, on your first point on a written manifesto and just sort of writing in general, we did the exact same. We actually wrote an encryption manifesto, which is just sort of like an end state with eight points for what encryption should look like. And it’s basically the same reason why major world religions managed to stay intact for so long as you just have a pretty fundamental, in a religious sense, moral code, in an Evervault sense its encryption or code or whatever you want to call it. And it just works to keep people aligned. So, it’s cool that you do that in your work as well.

Pretty much all of my early experience in tech was in Ireland. I think I was fortunate in the sense that I kind of came of age, to use that expression in technology, in Ireland at a great time. Intercom had already been pretty successful even before the time I was even starting to speak with some of these people. Some great people had either left there to start new companies or were still at Intercom doing great work. And I think they’ve sort of been the star of the Irish tech scene. Specifically, the Irish tech scene, but also more in general over for 10 years. And I think a lot of people have kind of drawn inspiration from that.

Separately with Stripe and John and Patrick Collison’s story, I think people just needed the narrative that it’s possible to build an enduring company. As an Irish person, I think we’ve always been quite cynical of ourselves. So, with those two specific examples, I think there’s been sort of unbridled optimism over the last 10 years, which has been great to see.

But the thing that we found when it came to building a team in Dublin is that the raw talent is here, and it’s actually more densely compacted into individual groups in universities, and so on. It’s actually way easier to find very talented people in Ireland because these people flock to Ireland, and it’s very easy to identify who they are.

They just, frankly, don’t get the same opportunities that they do in places like Silicon Valley. So, anybody could have joined Google in 1998, and stayed there for five or six years and be seen as sort of a deity almost in terms of how impressive they are and how talented they are. But Irish people just haven’t had as many opportunities.

Some people have gone to the US and have had the same scope. But it’s just about giving people the opportunity and the platform where we’ve raised venture capital, we’re solving a big problem, we have a great founding team, and the ability to join that and have that as a grounding is something that just didn’t really exist in Ireland for quite a long time.

There was great work done by a bunch of companies, in technology specifically, in the 90s and early 2000s, with Baltimore Technologies and Iona. So there had been these stories. But at that point, it had been confined to postgraduate research labs in places like Trinity. Now it’s just much more egalitarian, I think.

Supporting indigenous Ireland

SK: I do believe that we could probably do better in terms of policy supports for entrepreneurs, particularly around encouraging people to incorporate here, exit here, pay taxes here, and that kind of thing.

I still think that there’s enough of a differential between the Ireland versus Delaware versus whatever various places. Fundamentally, when you look at the kind of jobs that are being created, you look at the kind of opportunities and the IP that’s being created by Irish companies in Ireland, it seems to me to be a no brainer that we would encourage that to the greatest possible degree. And we wouldn’t treat Evervault the same way as an Irish landlord that’s just acquiring some asset and then getting rid of that asset. It does seem to me to be a category error to treat the two things similarly. If you create €1 billion worth of value from the work that you do in Evervault versus holding shares in some other company that you didn’t create any value in, it seems to me to be very, very, very wrong to treat those two things in the same way. And I think to the extent that we could support that better, we should.

SC: Yeah, And I think there’s been a lot of great work on the policy front of the last few years. I’ll preface this by saying that I understand how ludicrous this might sound to some people who aren’t in technology, but a lot of the policy at the moment incentivises people to take the approach of starting a company, getting a few customers, building up some IP, and then sort of selling it for €1 million or €10 million. I know there’s a sort an entrepreneur’s relief for the first €1 million of a capital gains on selling a company that you started or you are the majority shareholder of is tax free.

I think a couple of really small changes to incentivise people to hold longer and keep on going is all that’s needed. So, I push back on the premise of people creating tax relief for founders, because, firstly, enduring companies don’t get built by founders who are worried about what the tax implications will be down the line. I think if you’re doing your job well and you’re trying to build a large scale, enduring company, then who cares? The other piece is, and people tend to conflate the two things, is early founders and early employees should be treated totally different.

As a founder, you own your shares, you sell them down the line, you pay capital gains tax or whatever. And it’s actually pretty fine. Founders rarely complain about what it’s actually like for themselves. And some people do, they prefer to have 33 per cent more of whatever great financial outcome that they have. But early employees who take on as much, if not more, risk. In my case, I personally didn’t take on a massive amount of risk beyond people in third level degrees, whereas other people left companies that we’re doing really well to join me in the early days, and they’re left in an ancient regime of income tax on stock options and so on.

And there’s been some work on the Keep scheme, were basically you pay capital gains tax on options as opposed to income tax. I think that’s great. But the biggest issue is that the most exciting companies in Ireland tend to incorporate in Delaware, like you mentioned. But for reasons that most people don’t actually think. Most people think that the Delaware scenario is purely a tax thing. And the reality is companies in the early days when they’re venture backed aren’t worrying about corporation tax at all because it’s going to be a long time before they’re worried about what 12.5 per cent of their operating profits look like, because operating profits are a rare thing in the early years of the tech start-up. It’s actually just purely to keep things streamlined.

US investors and even European investors have all the paperwork ready to go. Lawyers are very, very quick and streamlined at doing transactions with Delaware companies. And I think people need to appreciate that the Delaware thing isn’t anything malicious at all. It’s not tax structuring. It’s not tax avoidance. It’s purely just for streamlining the transactions. It just increases the likelihood of a company’s success. But Delaware companies aren’t entitled to the Keep scheme, which isn’t a great scenario. And so, my plea to the public and to policymakers and legislators is to reconsider that.

But yeah, I think overall, your point of policy not being set up for companies to be successful, I think is partially true. But equally, the fixes are very, very small, and I think it would be extremely uncontroversial in any budget changes for either this year or next year or whatever the case may be. And there are a lot of great groups working towards it now. So I’m optimistic.

SK: I’m struck by the almost behavioural answer you gave there, which is literally like the default bit of paper that you have to fill out. On a big day, where I imagine you having to fill out a bunch of paper and somebody goes, ‘just sign that, it’ll be grand, move on.’ And you’re so focused on the product that you’re not really worried about in 10 years’ time when you have to worry about the tax implications of any of it, if ever. You want to get on.

When thinking about refurbishing city buildings, one of the big reasons that people don’t refurbish city buildings is just the regulatory complexity of it all. Having all the various regulatory bodies, fire safety, etc., in the same office, it turns out, speeds the refurbishment process up by about 50 per cent. It’s just behavioural. It’s just a question of designing the service so that the default is easy. Which interestingly ties us back in a weird public policy way to Evervault, because we’ve just described the value proposition of Evervault but for public policy. I’m struck by the weird symmetry there. If you could just make things a little bit easier, and more streamlined, and better designed, people will be delighted by it, and they would use it more.

SC: Yeah, it’s that point of just critical thinking day-to-day. Most people don’t think about everything. And I think even if you speak with some great founders in great companies, they kind of start companies by accident. Like they’re working on something and all of a sudden there’s a couple of people that want to use it and before they know it they’re a company. But people don’t sit down at the drawing board and say, this is the company, this is what it’s going to look like, here’s our tax structure, here’s our corporate structure. At scale you do, after you hire your first few people. But the first couple of years of a company are a lot more turbulent than people expect them to be. It’s just like a structured sequence of complete accidents that sometimes works out pretty well.

It’s just like the check boxes for agreeing to privacy policies, making it explicit means that you’re probably going to turn a few people. But some of the dark patterns online where by signing up you accept our terms of service, you massively increase the number of people that go through it. But it’s still sort of the same outcome where people opt in.

Vocations and the nature of entrepreneurship

“Starting a company is really hard.”

SK: I love the idea of a structured sequence of seeming random occurrences. It’s an uncertain few years starting company. I guess that’s why few people, relatively speaking, do it. We often see greater calls for entrepreneurship in either Irish secondary education or Irish higher education. What are your thoughts on these kind of calls?

SC: Although most founders tend to read and learn from other founders that have gone before them, entrepreneurship in general is just absolutely a vocation. I think it’s great to incentivise people, in schools, that have this vocation or this interest and actually want to start something for themselves. Obviously, everything should be structured to give them the resources and give them the guidance and encouragement that they need to be able to do it. But I think the notion that people who either don’t want to do it or don’t have the vocation should become founders or entrepreneurs is kind of misguided for the most part.

And the reason I say that is, and we can touch on it later on, but there’s going to be fewer and fewer breakout companies over the coming years. More companies are getting funded, more companies are getting funded and they’re lasting longer. Something that’d be far more valuable for an individual is to join one of those three companies, just for example, that are breaking out over the next few years, and grow with them. The first one to two years or three years of a company are actually extremely undifferentiated and super boring. It’s just a slog of making your first hires, and the sample set of people that you can ask for advice as you go through the company’s lifespan just decreases massively over time. You can ask a bunch of people how to make your first technical higher. But so many people know it, and it’s not a particularly complex thing.

But when things get interesting is two years down the line, when the company has done all the slog, the initial slog of getting things up and running, they understand that now the problem is scale and that’s when things start getting really exciting.

With all of these people starting companies, and again, I’m coming out of purely at this from the lens of venture backed tech companies , I think more people should just join companies that are breaking out rather than starting something from scratch and potentially not learning something that’s particularly differentiated or interesting. Yeah. That’s probably a controversial thing to say and seems to go against popular narrative.

SK: It definitely does. I also think that there is also a bit of a myth around the technical founder. You hear a lot of the time that you need to have X,Y and Z technical skills in order to do run a company like A,B, or C. Obviously with Evervault, you really needed to understand your problem deeply before you had a go at building a company, and try to solve the problem at a bigger scale.

There does seem to be a large discussion, particularly in the tech space, around the difference between a technical versus a non-technical founder. Where would you come down in a particular argument?

SC: Yeah, there’s all these sort of classical tropes that appear in books and movies and so on. Like the beauty of starting a company is it actually doesn’t matter what you can or can’t do. In a company in its first year, there’s 100 things you need to do. All that matters is that you get them done. And I think as a founder, whether you do them yourself or whether other people do them isn’t particularly consequential.

Most Silicon Valley advice tends to focus on the idea that a founder should do everything at least once, so they understand what they’re actually doing or what they’re hiring for. And I do generally agree with that. But I think from my perspective, I’m a technical founder as I’ve done all the initial product work before the company was founded, but I have no formal background in professional software development. I don’t have degree in computer science, and I don’t have to the archetypal business co-founder. Going back to my point about distilling everything into its simplest form, all you have to do in the first year of a company is just build a product and just get people to use it. And I think people tend to over complicate things, especially when they come from larger companies where getting people to use it looks more like building a full enterprise salesforce and having sales quotas and so on.

But the reality is, you spend from 9:00 am to 5:00 pm you write a bit of code, from 5:00 pm to 7:00 pm you send a few cold emails, you have a little spreadsheet with a bunch of companies that you think could be interested in using your product, and you just send a bunch of emails. I think a lot of people tend to overcomplicate things as I said there. But the big question is how do you get things to scale? And that’s when I think people tend to draw in those tropes about the technical founder should be focused on products, the business founder should be focused on sales. But you just need someone to own it. It doesn’t necessarily need to be a founder, and I think people discount themselves purely based on their background or what they perceive themselves to be good or bad at. All I can say is that starting a company is really hard, but it’s not complicated until you get to a certain point, then it gets really complicated, but I won’t talk too much about that.

Learning to scale

SK: You’re currently scaling a company. You’re having this dramatic expansion and raising more funding, as my father would say, you’re sucking diesel. So, what have you learned about the scaling process or what are you learning as you do this? As you get this thing moving from a couple of people in a room to having a HR department and vice president in charge of stone tablets. What have you learned in that experience?

SC: I think the soaking diesel metaphor is pretty great because it can be juxtaposed with the idea of just drinking from a fire hose and it’s both a good thing and a bad thing at the same time. I think distillation is the common thread I’m just going to draw through the whole conversation because like day-to-day as things start ramping up, it just becomes more and more important that you’re picking the things that do matter and you get better at blocking out things that aren’t consequential to the company’s success. But it’s pretty overwhelming, which might be the wrong word, but you definitely need a degree of mental fortitude to be able to be comfortable with the idea of that.

You’re just going to be hammered with hundreds and hundreds of different things every day, and it’s about sifting through all of those things, picking the one or two things that do matter and actually making an impact on them. It’s very easy to fall into the trap of those hundred things coming at you every day and you just saying yes or no to each of them. I think that’s that makes sense at scale. And Ben Horowitz in his book, The Hard Thing About Hard Things writes about a wartime and peacetime CEO. A peacetime CEO can afford to make decisions and delegate, but we’re still very much at the stage where if the distinction between player, player/coach, and coach, we’re definitely closer to the player, player/coach side of things, at least from my own personal perspective. So, it’s about being able to do the work day-to-day and also you drinking the firehose and not drowning.

Going back to distillation and setting what’s important in the earliest days at the company, entropy just kills companies if it compounds over time.

I think a Keith Rabois who is a partner at Founder’s Fund tweeted about this a while ago on how mistakes and moving slowly doesn’t kill companies, entropy does. And the easiest way to stop entropy in the earliest days of a company is basically by finding what doesn’t matter, making sure that it doesn’t get done and making sure that everybody’s focusing on what’s important. But that’s easier said than done. Most companies are far from perfect at this stuff, but it always looks much better on the outside than it is on the inside.

Universities and the school at Athens

SK: Obviously, I spend most of my time as a lecturer, teaching students about things, and I would like to think that what I’m teaching them is something that they will find useful in some sense in the future. And I don’t mean useful in a labour market sense, by the way, I don’t believe fundamentally, or maybe this is the lie that professors everywhere tell themselves, that everything is labour market based. But obviously a lot, or maybe most, of what we have to do is have an applied focus to it. We have to be doing things that will help the student in their journey in life and particularly in the job market. Universities are a thousand-year-old technology and every university is more or less a copy of the one that the people who worked in it previously went to.

Like most organisations, if you want to have Amazon’s corporate culture, just hire the CFO or the CEO of Amazon, and whatever your company is, the next day it’s going to be pretty close to that culture. So, we have this University system that more or less produces the same types of people that it produced a couple of hundred years ago. They look different in that there are more types of people produced, like more women, but the way we teach what we teach hasn’t really changed.

As somebody who chose not to go to university, probably for bigger and better things, I’d be interested to get your thoughts on the state of education. What you’d like to see done differently, what you would have preferred to have done. I’m from looking from the outside and seeing you’re hiring people who have been to university. A thought on the future of education from you would be great.

SC: I guess one of the big questions is probably maybe even a question for you is when did the universities diverge from the idea of the School of Athens? Universities at one point where a much smaller group of people and day-to-day was about your discourse and dialectics. These days, universities are extremely career focused. More people are going than ever before. Most people in Ireland do the Junior Cert, do the Leaving Cert and the CAO is a very easy thing to fall into by accident. Like what changed and when did it happen?

SK: A good question. Essentially the university as a concept was roughly the same from around the founding of the university of Bologna, which is maybe a thousand years ago and Oxford then maybe 100 years later. Up until well after the Reformation and into the 17th century. So the lecturer was the lector and literally read out of the book because the book was so expensive and the students took the notes down from the lecture.

But the basic idea was that there is knowledge, it must be copied, and then having produced your own set of notes from a bunch of different lecturers’ lectures, you’re then able to make your own notes later on. And that essentially brings you just above the point of if the Enlightenment and really where science as established endeavour starts to kick off. Almost immediately after that, universities began to professionalise, whereas they had been a branch of Holy Orders and Newton, for example, refused to take Holy Orders. And in Cambridge at the time, you had to.

So, at a certain point he had to be a priest to get this thing. So, there’s a fusing over the last thousand years of the religious and the academic, and all the various organisational structures are very very similar. They’re all similar to the military in a certain sense. But then you get up anyway to the 18th century and 19th century, that’s where the big universities began to professionalise and complexify. There wasn’t a lot to them. The Glasgow university and Edinburgh university by Adam Smith, the lecturer just stood up when he was giving a lecture, he would ask for his fees at the end of the lecture, you pay him for lecture, you move on. And if you didn’t like a lecture, you didn’t pay him. It’s very simple. And even that was true for the professors, even up to that time.

When science required larger apparatus to do its thing, that’s when you start seeing the complexification of universities. You move to the 20th century, then the second and first World Wars really kick it off because it becomes an agency of research.

You find MIT and Harvard and Cornell and Berkley actually aligning themselves with large parts of the US military. And then it just explodes in size. And just to give you a sense of scale, the entire Irish higher education system spent €1 billion euros, but the research budget alone for MIT is $3 billion. It’s a totally different scale. But then in the 70s and 80s, universities pivot again, and they become a place where essentially you become trained for work. So, whereas accountants were previously trained in an apprenticeship fashion, now you do a degree in accountancy. And it was similar for nursing and that kind of thing.

So professionalisation of all kinds of degrees happen. And then you start finding universities having technology transfer offices, research offices, and student welfare groups, that kind of thing. So the modern university, as it exists today, is really a much more complex object than the one that existed in UCD or Trinity in 1960, where the administration overhead with something like five per cent and now it’s something like 35 per cent because you just have this extra super structure that has to sit around. And the average person listening to this probably thinks that academics still get four months holidays, stuff like that. It’s not, we get two weeks like everyone else.

But in the 70s and 80s we did. And I can remember my first day in UL years ago, I was still in job interview mode, I’m actually in UL 15 years, believe it or not I’m still in job interview mode and it was a lecturer’s last day on the job when it was my first and he brought me in for a cup of tea and asked me what’s the best thing about research? And I was like, ‘Well, professor, the best thing about working in universities is the chance to have interesting conversations with interesting colleagues like yourself’, some kind of bullshitty answer like that. He went, ‘No, no, no. The best thing about working in universities is the ability to go to the cinema in the afternoon.’ I was like, ‘Okay….’ It was really quite different. Nobody goes to the cinema in the middle of the afternoon anymore.

Some of it is responding to the demands of students. Some of it is just the fact that we know what we need to do for society. But I’m struck by the fact that say the new President of UL turns around and goes, ‘Here are all the things we’re not going to do’, like what you’re saying in terms of saying, ‘Here are eight principles. We’re going to do these things. It’s on one page and we’re not doing a nineth.’

We are creatures of government policy. So, if government, say Minister Simon Harris says, ‘No, no, no, I’ve decided you’re doing a nineth. Respect your principles and stuff, but you’re doing a nineth.’ Well then, you kind of have to do that. There’s some goof research on that.

I’m just aware, this interview is about you.

SC: Well, this is a conversation. The thing that stands out then from what you’ve described there, the two things that have changed that need to be considered the most are firstly the context in which teaching happens. Universities and academies used to be taking the single book where the piece of information was and giving it to everyone else. Obviously, that’s changed now where everyone has access to the information itself. So presumably the job of a university has to change.

Secondly, is incentive structures. As you said with the University of Edinburgh and Glasgow, the professors is having to lecture by lecture perform, even with David Hume when he was doing the same thing, but just on the streets. They had to worry about being entertaining enough. In some ways, these people, David Hume specifically, was probably like the original marketing King where everybody loved to see him. He built up a brand for himself as well as having to be intellectually interesting as well as.

It might be overly simplistic, but those seem like the things that need to change. Lambda School is re-approaching pedagogy as a whole by just doing everything online and assuming that people have access to the same resources that they normally do.

And they’re also sort of restructuring in the incentive mechanisms where people can opt in an opt out of a programme. They don’t get an accredited degree, but the idea is that they go there to learn rather than to get the accreditation itself. Running a competitive analysis then, how do universities compete against that over time?

Obviously, I’m neglecting the part of a university where 18-year-olds just want to go and hang out with other 18-year-olds as well, which is obviously a super important part of people being on campus.

And even over the last 18 months or two years or whatever, when students haven’t been able to do that, I wonder how peoples’ perception of universities will change. And actually have universities been thinking about this or talking about this?

SK: There has been a big move first to actually to survey students and see what they want. And about 70 per cent of respondents in the survey said they want to be on campus and want the delivery of lectures and all the learning to happen on campus because it’s not just lectures like you said, it’s the social development. But the other 30 per cent actually said they want to learn online and find it far better because it’s more flexible, it’s way cheaper because you don’t have to commute, or have the housing costs.

What I think we’ll end up doing is going into some blended version where you will do a bit of the Lambda version, but also acknowledge you’re 18 and you need to discover yourself as well, which we now euphemistically called the student experience. But I think it is a catch all umbrella term for everything from going out on the lash and waking up in a bin, to sports, to that maturing process that we think college should be for.

It also presupposes that the ideal college student is 18. And I think that’s going to change as well. I finished education when I was 27, which is quite late. That’s just because I refused to leave. But now I’m 43. I probably will need to do some upskilling in a formal sense at some point. I’m struck by the fact that there are few incentives for me to do that. Obviously, my research keeps me at the forefront of my little piece of the academy, but there are certain skills that I feel like you need to go back to the well on. I’m struck by the fact that there isn’t a mechanism to make that happen yet. Anyway, of course, there might well be you never know.

The improvements and the changes that I’ve seen over the last 15 years, which includes a giant economic crisis and the pandemic in the system are quite profound. I feel not just privilege, but I feel actually very enthusiastic that improvement is possible and that we can see it taking place almost everywhere, which is great.

So, let me finish with asking about books. You mentioned a few books that you found instructive. If you had to pick one or two that somebody in your position, or somebody who is thinking about following your route, should read as almost like a priority for a young person to get their head around and to make their journey towards a successful company better, what would you choose for them to read or listen to or watch?

SC: Yes, this is always the hardest question that people can ever ask. I think because firstly, the ultimate dilettante when it comes to reading. I superficially skin books and just underline paragraphs that seem interesting. One book that I found extremely interesting when it comes to building a technology company is this book called In the Company of Giants. Basically, it’s a series of interviews with tech leaders in Silicon Valley in the mid to late-90s I think. So, Steve Jobs is interviewed. Bill Gates is interviewed. And one of the most striking things from that book, for me, is how much how much generational companies from each decade through Silicon Valley history have just built on top of each other, specifically when it comes to culture, and how they structure themselves. Steve Jobs in the interview openly admits to just completely ripping a bunch of Hewlett-Packard’s operating principles and applying them to Apple.

One thing that you see that’s very interesting, in my opinion, is that you just look at the progression of companies in the90s, the big breakout companies, a company like Amazon, Google, and shortly after you had Facebook, and then you have Stripe recently as well. Amazon’s customer obsession and all of these leadership principles that they have are very, very similar to some of the other principles that other companies in that group also follow. It’s basically because Silicon Valley tends to innovate on way too many things.

But I think how you structure a company is one thing that just shouldn’t be innovated on. Hierarchies and structures exist for a reason. They work pretty well. Almost like your point about how universities are structured on thousand-year-old religious orders and you compare the Carmelites or the Benedictines to a university, it’s just like comparing Hewlett-Packard to Stripe today. They’re all very similar, and there’s a reason that that pattern exists. It just gets easier and easier because every decade you have a few more companies to pick up on and learn from. So, it’s easier than ever to start a company. But equally, there’s a bunch of reasons to make it much harder.

So, that’s one book. This probably where I should say something like the Bible or something. But, yeah, that’s a hard question. Sure, there’s a bunch more.