One of my most endearing qualities, so I tell myself, is my willingness to offer personal experiences and especially abstract analogies bearing some interesting and creative connection with whatever a conversation is actually about.
For example, you might say, “It’s fundamental to our MI and important to the way we steer the business that everyone stays up-to-date with their journals.” And I might say, “Yes, exactly. It’s like Tunisian desert ants who count their steps so that they can use trigonometry and the angle of the sun to navigate without having to retrace an outbound journey. Did you know that scientists were able to prove they were doing it by attaching stilts to the ants legs and causing them to overestimate distance travelled?”
But earlier this week actually I bit my tongue for once. I was fortunate to be talking to Dean, who’s our new Global Chief Operating Officer, and we were discussing the development of new propositions and services, new to Croud. There may sometimes be the case for “investing ahead” in a service, like when its potential value is so great that it’s worth putting more into it than you want to get out - at first - to enable it to lift off and realise its full value a little further down the line.
And what I wanted to say but didn’t, this time, is, “Yes, and actually that reminds me of nuclear fusion. You know it’s been in the news, there’s an American lab somewhere that uses lasers instead of magnets to heat hydrogen and the results of an experiment last month are considered to demonstrate a reactor that approached what they call “ignition.” It’s a tipping point. All those lasers demand a lot of energy but if you can do it right and get the conditions just right then the fusion begins to release alpha particles, which make the whole thing hotter, which accelerates the fusion process, which becomes self-sustaining and hey presto you’ve grown a money tree. And you’ve saved the planet.”
Now, I know what you’re thinking. Are our Data Solutions teams going to create a black hole? Don’t worry. First of all, a marketing agency can’t create a black hole, at all. Secondly, neither can a nuclear fusion reactor. Thirdly, I don’t think a particle accelerator is anything like a marketing agency but fourthly if a particle accelerator created a micro-black hole, it would evaporate in a fraction of a second.
The laser lab in the US managed to produce 1.35 Megajoules of energy from their experiment by pumping 1.9 Megajoules in. Megajoule. Mega joule. For reference, 1.35 Megajoules of energy is the same as you get from consuming 1 cup of breakfast cereal, 8 oz of milk, 1 banana AND a coffee. Imagine it.
1.35 out of 1.9 is 71%. That’s a negative gross profit margin of 41%. People who make plasma from Hydrogen pellets and lasers say that that’s the brink of ignition. That’s what I should have said to Dean.
Have a good weekend.