The Autonomous Revolution - with Bill Davidow

**Ray Rike** (0:00)
Hello, I'm Ray Reich, founder and CEO of RevOp Squared, and your host of the Metrics that Measure Up podcast. We talked to a wide variety of B2B, SaaS, and Cloud thought leaders, executives, investors, and people just like you to discuss the metrics and benchmarks they use to make metrics-informed decisions. Now on to today's show.
Welcome to today's episode of the Metrics It Measure Up podcast. Today, we are joined by Bill Davidow, longtime Silicon Valley venture capitalist, founder of More Davidow, bestselling author of the Virtual Corporation, and now his latest book, The Autonomous Revolution. Today, we will be covering four main topics with William. First, how technology advancements are leading to the Autonomous Revolution. Second, the intersection of technology and changing macroeconomic trends. Third, Autonomous Revolution, the third social phase change. What does that mean? Then finally, today's big tech equals tomorrow's government regularity. Bill, please take a moment to give a brief background of your overview to becoming a guest on the Metrics That Measure Up podcast.

**Bill Davidow** (1:29)
Well, I worked for a long time in Silicon Valley. I got a Ph.D. at Stanford and then went to work in a research lab and then became very interested in marketing and ended up running marketing and sales at Intel and then did venture capital. And then when I started, I didn't want to really be full time in business anymore.
I started writing books. So I actually, I started writing books when I entered venture capital. So I enjoyed writing and I've written a number of books that have been commentaries on technology.

**Ray Rike** (2:09)
Well, before we jump into your latest book, The Autonomous Revolution, could you just take a moment to reflect on the major inflection points that you have seen in a technology evolution over your career, taking us up to current day?

**Bill Davidow** (2:25)
Well, I was thinking about this. When I was at Intel and I joined Intel in 1973, and it was just after they had introduced the first microprocessors and I ended up running the microprocessor division. At Intel, we were convinced we were changing the world.
We thought of kicking off a technology revolution and everything like that. What I've come to realize is that we didn't change the world. We automated a lot of it. The world stayed the same, but it ran more efficiently.
Cash registers worked better, traffic lights worked better, but business didn't change. We still had spreadsheets. They just ran on a computer instead of on paper and pencil. And we had better inventory management systems. But we didn't transform the structure of things. And what is different now is that the real thing that is happening with our technology today is that we are changing the structure of things. And by that, I mean, you know, a bank becomes an application on a cell phone or something like that. In the past, used Intel technology, a bank was still a bank. But today, it's got a totally different form.

**Ray Rike** (3:59)
So, and since we're transforming industries, your life as we know it, one of the things I wanted to double-click on is how that's changing macroeconomic trends. One of the things we talked about the Industrial Revolution was how increase in human resource productivity actually contributed positively to gross domestic product growth. And I believe you have a hypothesis that says, we're fundamentally changing some of the macroeconomic theses that we have. Is that correct?

**Bill Davidow** (4:31)
Yeah. I mean, you look at it, and it's one thing to make a bank more productive. So you need, let's say, you put in place an ATM and you need fewer tellers, something like that. It's another thing. If a bank becomes an application or on a cell phone, and then the bank goes away, you don't need to build a building to put the bank in.
You don't need a car to get to the bank. You don't need somebody to clean up the bank. You don't need electricity to heat the bank. And this causes the economy becomes remarkably efficient. And in many cases, people aren't needed anymore. So this is a very different kind of environment that we're going into. And there's a real question in my mind when we're through with it, if there is going to be enough of the traditional kind of work that people did. And I realize today that everybody's scrambling to find employees, but I think a lot of work is going to go away.

**Ray Rike** (5:46)
Well, that's interesting, because if you look at certain economic productivity measurements, the revenue per employee was something during the Industrial Revolution. Over the last 30, 40 years, we saw it go from $100,000 to a couple of hundred thousand, maybe to $500,000 per employee, but in this digital universe, we're seeing revenue per employee of a million, two, three million dollars. Is that part of why you're concerned that we won't have enough work for that kind of, I would say, the mass market of middle-income employees?