Published in the San Diego Union-Tribune, July 21, 2025
by Neil Senturia
How do I know that the world will come to an end? It will eventually get so smart that it will no longer need itself.
OK, I confess, I am being a bit cheeky and stupid, but there is an underlying element here that might prove interesting to entrepreneurs. Complexity.
I have a friend (OK, less than five, but I am grateful), and as a token of our relationship, he buys me a gift — a Bob Dylan record. A vinyl record in a sealed envelope, an original never played before, issued for the first time on Feb. 10, 1964, “The Times They Are A-Changin” record. Wow.
Vinyl. Huh, you know I gave away my Technics turntable and Klipsch speakers and Marantz tuner 40 years ago. This thing on my desk is a record. And just for the record, a new VPI Titan Direct Turntable retails for $95,000. Maybe he is trying to tell me something.
Complexity is often correlated with progress, and the coupling creates a fascinating problem, which is dramatically accelerated in our current world by the advent and increase in artificial intelligence.
My own little AI company is finishing up a product for launch in the fall. A discussion on “features” is held with management, and you guessed it, the nerds want it to sing the Lord’s Prayer in 23 languages, and the business folks just want it to work most of the time, in any language.
I bought a car a year ago, a plug-in hybrid. It took me three visits to the dealer to understand how to turn on the radio. I still can’t get the Padres baseball game.
I watched a movie last night. The couple buys a refrigerator and it comes with four ice trays in the freezer section. No automatic icemaker? Russia, 1940.
If you want to buy a bag of popcorn at the movies, not so fast. The one being sold at F1 is in the shape of a racing helmet and costs $30 — popcorn included.
A study by WrenchWay shows a shortage of 642,000 technicians by 2026. Those are the guys who fix your car, the same car that now has enough sensors that you need a Ph.D. in physics to decipher the manual.
An article in The Wall Street Journal suggests that the computer science degree, once viewed as a golden ticket, is now tarnished a bit by the more than 100,000 tech layoffs in the past six months.
At one of the best schools in the country, Carnegie Mellon, professor Thomas Cortina says “AI has really shaken how we are going to teach computer science education.” Students think AI is a magic bullet, but “they didn’t understand half of what the code was.”
Now back to the future. There is hope. About 190 bookstores are opening over the next two years. You know, stores where you walk in and touch a book. And vinyl album sales have increased from 13 million to 49.6 million over the past eight years.
Entrepreneurs innovate. They add features. They improve the product. Their stuff does more and more cool things. But perhaps this is a moment to challenge conventional thinking in that regard. The famous architect Mies van der Rohe was quoted as saying, “Less is more.”
I am not suggesting we go back to the car radio with five buttons, but as a software CEO, I am thinking less about new features and more about what features a customer really needs and that must work seamlessly for a long time without breaking.
Buy a new coffee maker. Twenty-one different settings and brews. You can turn it on with your phone when you are 1,200 miles away boarding a plane to come home from Cancun. Can I just get black?
Finally, appreciate how hard it is to truly understand how to make anything work really well, whether a product or a city or a country. Entrepreneurial thinking is not only about features, but also about the basic challenge of what to think about.
What do we hold as our highest human aspirations and the most important values? That is where we should apply our focus, our effort, our genius.
After all, how many ice cubes do you really need at any one time?
Rule No. 790: Only what you need or love.