Since the journalists who attended TED last week are slowly trickling out their articles on the TED experience, I figure I can still get away with a couple more belated thoughts on the conference.
My first observation is that conference organizers have learned their lesson about confidentiality since the Wall Street Journal executive conference last year. During that conference, I wrote about Bill Gates' comments on emerging technology. It turned out that the journalists at the conference were unable to write about Gates' comments because the comments were expressly off the record. But the conference organizers had not thought about telling bloggers to keep Gates' comments quiet and, as a result, they weren't. In contrast, this year at TED when Steve Case spoke, he too spoke on the condition that his comments be off the record. However, this time the request was made to the entire audience at the time of the interview. While we bloggers surely had no contractual obligation to uphold Case's request of confidentiality (as did the journalists who were comped at the WSJ conference), the fact that such a request had been made openly to everyone in the room made it morally difficult to report what Case had to say (for what it is worth, however, there frankly wasn't that much worth reporting on anyway). I have no doubt that Walt Mossberg has learned his lesson and will follow suit at his conference this year as well.
On a different note, I was struck by Brian Muirhead's comments on the NASA mission to Mars. Muirhead ran the mission and was given these instructions by the higher-ups at NASA — "I want you to take risks but do not fail." Those instructions resonated with me because I have heard them spoken (in one form or another) a thousand times by Venture Capitalists. Muirhead attributed the success of the Mars project to three factors: 1) calculated risk taking, 2) the application of well tested technology, and 3) a great team (as he said in his talk, "it's the team, stupid."). Broadly speaking, these are precisely the success factors of any startup. I would suggest that first and foremost, it is the team stupid. And with a great team, it is possible to take calculated risk based upon the application of well tested technology. While it may be unrealistic to suggest that NASA or any startup can take big risks to develop transformative technology and reject failure as even a possibility, yet that is precisely what we VCs are looking for and demanding of our startups. Its a tall order but, hey, if we can land a rover on Mars, how frickin' hard can it be to build a piece of enterprise software.