Fox trails in the snow

It's been snowing lightly since dawn, and all morning the dogs have been fussing at the back door wanting to go for a romp. Finally, I put on my coat and gloves, and out we went. The dogs were beside themselves with joy, gamboling in the snow ahead of me as we passed through our yard. As we came to the street, I clipped on their leashes and we walked together up the hill towards the old reservoir.

Climbing the hill I noticed that our old friend the fox had made its presence known, as there were three sets of fox tracks that came down from the abandoned reservoir, through the fence, and across the road. For the last year they've been a shadowy presence, spotted every few weeks but only for an instant in the distance, or as a sillouette in the light of a street lamp. The snow made their presence more concrete, recording their passing in a way that couldn't be waived off as wild imagination or fantasy.

Continuing my walk with the dogs I mused that, like the fox, I had recently left some footprints in the snow and now needed to consider what they'd revealed. You see, I'm currently working at a rather large company, doing useful but fairly mundane work of the "another cog in the machinery" variety. I'd fallen into that gig through a combination of chance, intent, and corporate acquisition, a high profile at a risky startup being traded for the relative security of the corporate staff, working with a new bunch of folks who knew me only in my current role. But, I'd recently gotten a call from an old friend who needed some advice on positioning his new company, so over lunch I walked him through the intricacies of pitching his business plan to a VC and demonstrating his prototype software to them.

Like any prototype, his had the dual problem of being not nearly complete, and not quite stable. This often leads to the demo strategy of showing only what works 100% of the time, which is safe but often boring:

"As you'll see in our demo, our company has leapfrogged the research community by creating the first Quantum Computer based on nonyl qbits, allowing 512 degrees of freedom in each computational state. The entire system is held in isolation by suspending it in liquid Helium-3 within a 10 Tesla magnetic field. No one else can do this."

"Uh, your demo shows you can add together two numbers, as long as the result is less than seventeen."

"Right! But we can also use this same technology to resolve Elliptic cryptographic sets, solve knapsack problems in Order(N) time, and predict tomorrow's NASDAQ opening stock prices."

"It adds two numbers."

"With a few years more work and $50M of your dollars, it will do so much more!"

Well, unlike my friend's hypothetical addition problem, his corporate positioning issues were tractable. Basically, he needed to telegraph more of the "magic" his team believed was potential in the technology, without turning the business and development plans into fantasy. I gave him some suggestions as to what areas to expand into detailed examples, and where to generalize. After promising I'd keep my eyes open for talent he might need, I bid him farewell.

Back at the office, dealing with the email backlog caused by my lunchtime absence, I pondered that conversation's impact on my attitude. It felt great to be able to work at that level again, if only for an hour and gratis, but how real was that effort compared to the certainty of a paycheck, albeit with its daily headache and sense of going nowhere? Like the fox caught out of its den by the snow, I'd left my footprints behind in the expectations of my friends, a couple of signed NDAs, conference paper reviews, and in one case an issued patent that had fallen out of a chance lunchtime conversation. Now, I found myself wondering if I was still a carnovore, or had become one of those "politically correct" Disney analogs, a lion surviving on nuts and berries so as to not upset anyone else in the jungle.

I'm still not sure where those tracks in the snow may lead.