What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Smarter

In ten days' time it will be three years to the day since I was successfully operated on for pancreatic cancer.  Some of you reading this may be unaware of the prior story; worry not, this is not a post about cancer. It is, though, a post about survival.

There's a saying about how 'What doesn't kill you makes you stronger' that many undergoing chemo- and/or radiation therapy often hear, or even use themselves, to make light of the unpleasantness of the process and to remind themselves that there is a flip side to the nastiness of the "planned poisoning" that they are enduring: it may extend their lives and is therefore “better than the alternative” (as in, death).

My purpled Twitter avatar, to mark World Cancer Day last month (Feb 4)

But recently a colleague of mine in the world of the Internet, Guy Kawasaki, hit upon a headline - I have yet to check whether it was Guy's own or whether he was passing on something from elsewhere - that, for me, is much more pregnant with meaning and possibility, in terms of viewing cancer in the first place, and chemothererapy/radiation treatment in the second, as a potential inflexion point for anyone who survives one or both:

              What Doesn't Kill You Makes You Smarter

This, for me, is the much more honest and uplifting statement. Do I feel stronger, having dodged the bullet - thanks to radical Whipple surgery - of the deadliest of all the cancers? Not really. If I could restore my strength to pre-diagnosis levels or above I'd be happy as a clam; realistically speaking, it is not especially likely, as there remain one or two challenges associated with Whipple surgery which tend to linger no matter how hard one tries - a surgically rearranged digestive system is plain not as effective as one that's been left intact.

On the other hand, do I feel smarter? Most emphatically, yes. The things that addressing and overcoming adversity teaches you - about yourself, about those who love you and are loved by you, about your professional colleagues both direct and indirect, about total strangers and/or long-lost friends; about nutrition, about the Internet, about the healing power of music and above all of love, about cognitive mysteries such as "chemo brain" and the reassurances increasingly offered by brain science; about physical capacity, about mental agility, about emotion, about faith…

In truth there isn't a single aspect of the human condition about which you do not, on being confronted with an early departure from the game of life, end up a tad smarter if on the contrary you have the good fortune to survive.

"Survival" and "survivor" remain the metaphors of choice when dealing with people like me but, speaking here only for myself, I am not sure how useful those words are. We are *all* survivors, after all; we all survive, daily, onslaughts of inconsiderateness or even plain cruelty, of injustice either direct or indirect, of disappointment and/or even despair. We all survive week in, week out the challenges of work and play, of life and love, of learning and of teaching, and of the eternal search for meaning in which we are all, to greater or lesser extents of awareness, engaged.

So the human being who "survives" cancer, of whatever variety, is no different from one who survives any other of life's curve-balls: bereavement, for example, or financial ruin. There is a commonality, and it is that of the bounceback or comeback. We humans are resilient. We have mastered endurance. We are *all* survivors. Of something. Of life itself, perhaps.

But the Kawasaki headline offers a more nuanced perspective.

Just as travel broadens the mind, or university, so pancreatic cancer it turns out is a hugely enriching life-phase that does, no doubt about it, leave you smarter. That it might just as easily have left you dead is not I think the point; many things kill us, from traffic accidents to natural disasters. But how many things actually make us smarter? We learn about humility - that is a given when quite literally your life (in the form of your innards) is for multiple hours in the hands of a surgeon. We learn about the irrefutable power of positivity. We learn about the boundaries of medicine and the central role of self-healing. We learn about the perils of certainty, and the corresponding importance of flexibility and agile modification of behavior and/or treatment. We learn about the often neglected importance of hydration. We learn about what truly makes us, and those around us, tick.

Now don't get me wrong. There are other ways to become wiser in this world, all of them less painful, less intrusive, and less detrimental and disruptive to the routine of yourself and your family. But that does not detract from this one, enduring truth, and I can vouch for it first-hand: What Doesn't Kill You - really, truly madly, deeply...take it from me - Leaves You Smarter.

All Aboard for the Internet of Things

“What makes for a red-hot company?” IDG Connect Editorial Director Martin Veitch asked himself rhetorically in November 2013. “Knowing which closely-held companies have the strength in depth to succeed is an inexact science,” he answered, “but there are some clues.”

A sufficient number of Veitch’s all-important clues – which include good management; a strong story; enthusiastic customers; a vibrant developer/partner community; strong funding from reputable companies; sales; growth; the positive views of experts in the field; market opportunity; and competitive differentiation – existed in the case of Kaazing to lead Veitch to include the Silicon Valley start-up in his final list of “20 Red-Hot, Pre-IPO Companies in 2014 B2B Tech” which IDG Connect, a division of IDG which is in turn the world’s largest technology media company, published November 21, 2013.

“THINK OF IT AS A ROCKET UP THE INTERNET’S TROUSER LEG”               –Martin Veitch, Editorial Director, IDG Connect

The IDG article explained how Kaazing “uses the emerging HTML5 Web Socket standard to speed up communications and create what it calls ‘the living Web’. Think of it as a rocket up the Internet’s trouser leg, if you will, or HTTP reimagined for the more liquid world of the modern Web versus the document-centric, static model of the Web circa 1995.”

Veitch then concluded, sagely: “With 5 billion Web users forecast for 2020 and with the Internet connecting to more and more devices, we desperately need this sort of technology to come good.”

His point is well made. In the brave new world that has since 1999 been called ‘Internet of Things’ (commonly abbreviated nowadays to just IoT), there are already millions of embedded electronic measuring devices connected: thermostats, pressure gauges, pollution detectors, cameras, microphones, glucose sensors, EKGs, electroencephalographs. They probe and monitor everything from cities to endangered species. There are sensors monitoring the atmosphere, our ships, highways and fleets of trucks, our conversations (thank you, NSA!), and even – in a movement called the Quantified Self (QS) – our bodies.

In the IoT, the Internet is getting in the way of the things

“The intersection of the Internet of Things and the future will to a very great extent happen on the Web, since nearly everything that technical and business innovators want to do around IoT needs to make use of Internet-level protocols. But the ‘things’ they want to talk to are typically encircled by Web infrastructure like firewalls, proxies and such.”

General Electric, which prefers to call the IoT the “Industrial Internet”, estimates that it will boost global GDP by a whopping $15.3 trillion in 2030. Cisco calls it “Internet of Everything” and is saying to anyone who’ll listen that IoT-related activity will boost global output by $1.6 trillion per annum throughout the next decade.

In his IDG report, Veitch mentioned that there are forecast to be 5 billion Web users by 2020; but what he didn’t mention is that there will be 10x that number of connected “things” – that’s to say, the Internet of Things will be called upon to connect not just 5 billion people, but also 50 billion things, from sensors to milk cartons, with trillions of connections between them. These things, like the people, will be always-on, always-connected, and always trying to communicate.

The intersection of the Internet of Things and the future will to a very great extent happen on the Web, since nearly everything that technical and business innovators want to do around IoT needs to make use of Internet-level protocols. But the “things” they want to talk to are typically encircled by Web infrastructure like firewalls, proxies and such. Which means that what is critically required is an entirely new architecture, a “Web Communication” architecture if you will.

And this is exactly what Kaazing has devised. It has devised gateways that extend benefits of scale, speed, predictability, reliability, and security across the multiple languages (protocols) spoken by the “things” that are becoming so densely connected in the IoT world. In fact Kaazing’s pioneering gateways will allow companies to on-board billions of different things (machines, individuals, and enterprises) to the Web in an always-on and always-connected state at unprecedented scale – and with enterprise grade performance, predictability, reliability, and security.

Kaazing’s customers can expect the performance of the Kaazing Gateway to provide for up to 100x latency and 1000x bandwidth reduction compared to those solutions being supported by the existing, “legacy” Web. In short, Kaazing has found a way to make the Web work more efficiently, securely, and reliably. “With tech company valuations at their highest for quite some time,” wrote Martin Veitch at the conclusion of his “20 Red-Hot, Pre-IPO Companies” piece, “signs of a bounce-back in major economies and several new waves of technological change, these are exciting times to be a new disruptor.”

“Kaazing has devised gateways that extend benefits of scale, speed, predictability, reliability, and security across the multiple languages (protocols) spoken by the ‘things’ that are becoming so densely connected in the IoT world.”

To which all at six-year-old Kaazing, which has recently (October 2013) picked up a little over $8M from NEA and CNTP and is working hard to establish an early but impressive lead in the Internet of Things market, would say one word: “Amen”.


Full disclosure: I have since 2007 been Founding Media Adviser to Kaazing Corporation and in mid-November 2013 joined the company as its full-time CMO.