The first morning I woke up in an old European town as a part of the Ancient Roman Empire. It felt like getting lost in a small fairy world with blue sky, green mountains, fresh air and pure water. People there spoke three languages, e.g. Italian, French and German. I spoke English. Thankfully I had a backup plan with a broken Quebecois accent taught by a German teacher. Also, I figured out why Germans spoke English so well by reading ...bills.
Another time a tornado of thoughts brought me to another continent. This first stop was Switzerland. I did not do much research and had jet lag. Took the wrong train lane and had a tour around another half of the country in two hours with a penalty cost around a hundred Franc.
I got an invitation to join a set of challenges. We talked about how to apply AI for Good. I was surrounded by a group of innovators in healthcare right in the heart of the Alps. It was a long journey after four years of my return to the continent. I personally felt tired during that time. Probably because of constant travel and the uncertainty during a trip.
There is a mis-perception that a lot of things in the Valley are invented by people in the Valley. In fact, they are not. I also mistake business canvas - a tool I learn from lectures from the internet - from Stanford, but a university in Lausanne. The institute that invited me was the birthplace of PyTorch which is now owned by Facebook in 2017.
I got three weeks in the Alps talking to people and trying stuff. Most of the people around me were innovators in the healthcare industry. Everything sounded good except for one thing: I was working on a climate project and my computer was broken. I guessed it was too old to adapt with different kinds of temperatures. There were a few times I carried in the trek in Vietnam -- just to make sure if something interesting popped up, I had a device.
I could not code or type or do anything, so I had to move around and talk to people. This ended up as a hybrid project afterwards. Interestingly this happened right after the end of a challenge when I moved to Lausanne and Geneva to know what Switzerland looked like. That was when I started to learn more about locals and see how the world capital was. During that time, I discovered a report from the largest insurance company about climate change. It was catastrophic and destructive to see how broken the whole economy and finance system would be. That was when I started to rethink. We need to find a repeatable and scalable business model to rebuild a flywheel of the economy. This is something that Silicon Valley could help. I decided to leave a spun off project on creativity and computer graphics to restart a customer development process. I did not know how, but just get started with what I already had, the hybrid project which I later named BlueSkin.
BlueSkin was a diagnostic tool for skin cancer - the most deadly cancer in the Western World with a long list of countries having a high percentage in both genders. It was aimed to calculate the risk at the early stage that helps potential patients focus on prevention, protection and early treatment. I had some competitive advantage due to my previous international healthcare challenge in 2017 that provided a super high quality data set from the top industrial lab with a strong benchmark.
In my head, I was thinking about what was the right way to communicate with the public about the threat of the environment to our daily life. Most of the people I talked to were senior residents living on mountains. It was three weeks plus I got stuck in an international challenge. So, I thought what if I gave people a missing piece that would trigger their actions that both benefit their own health and environment. It should be based on science with support from insurance.
Accidentally a 16 year old Swedish teenage activist provoked a climate strike. Government keeps delaying making decisions for a new Green Deal.
When moving to France to visit my former supervisor, I stumbled upon a lecture of a Nobel Laureate in Economy who later I learned that he was the first author of the IPCC report about climate change that won the Peace Nobel. At that moment, I only knew his strong interest in revolutionizing an entire economy theory with AI. When I decided to work on a BlueSkin, I decided to drop all fancy technologies behind and only focus on learning about value propositions. On that trip, I started to re-joined a remote accelerator called Pioneer and submitted weekly updates to them.
From France, I traveled to Germany to join a Global Entrepreneurship program. On the way, I saw several giant wind turbines. I keep thinking how we could reshape the economy to a new trajectory. I visited the Berlin Wall and reviewed world history. A lot of people in my language class in Montreal gave a lot of compliments to this beautiful city now known as a hub of culture, art and technology. However, talking about AI technologies, the public perception was still based on sci-fi movies.
Along with trips, I could not count how many times I moved in and out of Switzerland for business meetings. Switzerland is a land of privacy and premium healthcare models. It was not just so easy with a few conversations similar to how Valley works.
In the end, I took a train to Italy and arrived in the fabulous Milan of Lombardy in a day. Had a cup of espresso before departing for a return trip to Vietnam.