Philip Rosedale - Founder of Coffee and Power

Philip: I'm Philip Rosedale and my new company is called Coffee & Power. Coffee & Power is an attempt to use technology in the area of work to enable people to work together in new ways. I became convinced that there were going to be enormous changes coming in the way we work together. And that the idea of assigning a bunch of people who work for you salaries and telling them to go off and build a new software project was becoming increasingly antiquated. What we're trying to do with Coffee & Power is change the way work works. We're trying to create a network and a tool set for mobile work. We believe that increasingly people are going to work away from offices, they're going to work on contracts instead of on salaries. They're going to work with each other in a much more ad hoc digital way than they did before and we're trying to build a website and iPhone and Android apps that enable people to do that effectively. Imagine an app that was just for work that would let you look at a city and see where people with different skills worked. Say you're an entrepreneur and you need a web designer. Imagine being able to look at a map of a city and literally see that in this coffee shop, in this co-working space are the following 5 or 10 people. They were there yesterday and so they'll probably be here today. My message to kids today would be to realize that many of those subjects that you learned growing up or that you just learned in college that you think of as boring and they don't matter very much. They may matter a lot now because as we increasingly have the ability to change all of the world around us, all of these disparate subjects philosophy, psychology, architecture. Those subjects are going to matter more and more in a world that we now have the power to change so much. For example, looking back on history and seeing where the mistakes were made. It is a human tendency to believe that it's all been done and it hasn't. In fact, we're in a period now where the way in which technology is changing the world around us is accelerating. The possible space of new ideas is growing not shrinking. We as human beings are falling behind in the race with technology to exploit new possibilities. You know, I think as technology gets more and more human, as the internet and computing affects our lives in more and more mainstream ways, it creates an opportunity for kids, for students to turn almost any rich interesting education path into some impact on products and the rest of the world.