Tariq Krim describes himself as a dreamer and a doer. He is also the founder and CEO of Jolicloud, a pioneer in personal cloud computing. Prior to Jolicloud, Tariq founded Netvibes, the personal startpage used by millions around the world. Tariq and I have been friends for many years, and I was happy to have him as the first guest on my new podcast series, Between Worlds. Sitting in a beautiful courtyard in Paris, enjoying the late afternoon sun - we had a far reaching conversation ranging from the rise and fall of French innovation, the slow-tech movement, culture, luxury, and the future of consumer product design.

Mike Walsh: It's a beautiful spring afternoon, we're in Paris at the Buddha Bar hotel. It's the middle of fashion week. I'm here with Tariq Krim who is one of the original French digital luminaries. Tariq, we met quite a few years ago didn't we?

Tariq Krim: Absolutely. 2008, Denmark.

Mike Walsh: We were speaking at a conference together! Tariq has got an amazing story, he's a thought leader, an entrepreneur with a substantial entry on Wikipedia, but the thing I think I like the best is that you set up your first Minitel server at age 12.

Tariq Krim: There's actually an interesting story about that. We usually compare two type of people, digital natives, and the digital immigrants. The digital natives pretty much started their life with a computer. Funnily I was lucky enough to be in a similar position but in the 70s.

The first time I actually touched a computer we were with our teacher and they brought us to this science fair in Paris. There was this place where there was this computer and you would just type something on the keyboard and the computer would start speaking with an electronic voice. A very 70s electronic voice. It was fantastic. For me it was amazing and I just saw the guy typing on the keyboard. The moment the guy went to explain to the others how it worked, I just got in front of the computer and started typing. I barely spoke and only knew how to type my name, so I started typing my name and press enter like the guy did, and of course the machine started speaking.

However the machine hasn't even finished saying my name when I suddenly felt someone pinching my ear and it was my teacher who said, ‘don't touch this, you're going to break the computer.’ The scientist looked at me with a big smile. For me I took it like, welcome to the club. That was the beginning of a fantastic adventure in the world of digital. France was among one of the premier countries who tried to innovate. They realised that they had the Yellow Pages, which cost them a fortune in paper, and they had to provide it in every single home. So they asked themselves - why don't we turn that into a small device that we can put for free in every home? And on top of that we'll create other services.

One day we had an exchange student and he came in our in school, and he was the only one really having an interest as well with me in computers. He said to me - call me tonight on this number. So I called the number and I just listened to the tone of a computer, so I clicked on the Minitel and said, connect. I discovered we were connected to his little Commodore, (it was one of the popular computers back in the days). It blew my mind because suddenly I discovered that not only did big, large corporations have access to this, but I could. Suddenly we could take advantage of a multi billion dollar infrastructure created by the government to exchange information.

Mike Walsh: You know it's extraordinary when you look at France's early moves in the digital space, because I mean really they were global leaders in this kind of technology.

Tariq Krim: In fact, they were global leaders in two things. The first was this, but the second one is we invented the first organization which was held to protect people and private and personal data. At the time some people envisioned that the fact that we could create database of people, a very precise database of people - fully computerized access would actually be a risk for society. That was '78. It was really interesting how we were far in advance. Then how late we got a start, because of course the Minitel was an old school technology. A very centralized network.

Mike Walsh: Do you think it was almost like a manifestation of the Napoleonic bureaucracy come to life? I mean France has always been very successful in creating institutions and systems.

Tariq Krim: Absolutely. In a way it is, but also it open access to e-commerce. We had e-commerce in '84. In '84 you could buy with your credit card and it was hand delivered. It's unbelievable.

Mike Walsh: You know it's funny, because one of the things you are most famous for is creating Netvibes, which was one of the original successful European digital companies, but since then there haven't been from France a lot of break out successes. Do you think there's been some sort of conflict between French values and innovation since those days?

Tariq Krim: It's interesting because over the course of the last year I've been asked to advise the government on innovation and I did a report. The report was based on talent. My idea was, rather than focusing on the infrastructure, I was going to focus on the people. I gave a list of a hundred top engineers in France, some of whom were involved in writing Gmail. Actually, the original iPhone was built in Paris.

Mike Walsh: Really?

Tariq Krim: Yes. 

Mike Walsh: The prototype?

Tariq Krim: Everything. The CTO of Next, the guy who invented Objective C, he was part of it. He came with the idea of saying, we should do a phone. Then they had a team, and then one day the team was sent back to ... It's a longer story, but I'm not sure I can actually discuss publicly here. We've been on the verge of many, many innovations. When you look into Telsa, into SpaceX, into many companies, you actually see we have great talent. The problem is not about the talent, it's really about the fact that what something changed with the internet is that distributed smaller teams can have a global impact. Any time France wants to do something they believe it's going to be a tough decision. Think about it, Google appeared and then a few presidents in Europe, including our French president decided by signing a treaty that we would have the European search engine. That was, of course, it's all a disaster, but that shows that the ...

Mike Walsh: Because the whole interface would have to be in French, right?

Tariq Krim: Actually, the German were in there too. I usually blame the French, but the Germans, everybody, settled on the fact that you would decide administratively that a search engine would appear - rather than investing, or enabling teams to build stuff.

Mike Walsh: Do you think Europe has always traditionally worked on a commission driven innovation model? Where you get licences and regulations, it's top down as opposed to the bottom up Silicon Valley approach?

Tariq Krim: People always ask - where do all your ideas are come from? I say that they are from living in Paris. What you just see in the city, it's unbelievable. We have to deal with history, we have to deal with existing. It's really hard to challenge existence, when  existing is so beautiful. You go to the Louvre and you go around Paris. Why should you do a new disruptive building when ...

Mike Walsh: You don't want to disrupt Paris do you?

Tariq Krim: No. If you tear down a warehouse in Mountain View, to replace it with something else, nobody is going to actually cry.

Mike Walsh: It's interesting, when you look at the history of Paris it was disrupted. Haussmann actually levelled most of the city to create the aesthetic view of Paris we have today.

Tariq Krim: Absolutely. It comes by revolutions. I'm pretty sure a revolution is about to come. There's so much to be done. When you think about the sharing economy - did you know AirBnB’s biggest market is Paris?

Mike Walsh: Really?

Tariq Krim: It's the number one market in the world.

Mike Walsh: Given how expensive hotel here are, I'm not surprised.

Tariq Krim: It probably has to do with the fact that Paris is ... But you know it's funny because you see all these tourists coming to Paris and the airport is ludicrous. The transportation hasn't been really disrupted yet. There's room for innovation, but I think it has a top down, but also the fact that we have a generation of politicians that are educated during the cold war. So we don't really understand today's situation. The pre-internet era, so they don't really understand. They still see the computer as a tool, when it's an enabler of a new world. They don't understand the new world. Sometime they don't want the new world to exist. They don't want to become the disrupted, because politicians will be part of the disrupted.

Mike Walsh: The exception to this is luxury. In the luxury space French brands have dominated.

Tariq Krim: Absolutely.

Mike Walsh: For a long time. I guess you see now Apple looking to release that expensive gold watch. To some extent that technology is now starting to overlap into a higher margin, different vision of product design.

Tariq Krim: Absolutely. The funny thing is that they are hiring now. Most of the new hires are from the luxury space - Yves Saint Laurent, Burberry. That's interesting because I actually believe that these are people that really understand the power of brands.

The thing is I'm trying to push toward an idea. We have a French touch in music, but we also have a French touch in technology. That's what I was trying to do with Netvibes. We care about design, we care about product, but also I think there's a fundamental difference between Silicon Valley and Europe. We're a country of culture, of history, we value taking the time. We're the slow movement. In Italy, for food. I actually advocate for a slow movement as well with technology ...

Mike Walsh: That's interesting

Tariq Krim: ….where it's not about all the fear of missing out. I wrote a post about it called, The Age of Emotion, where the technology should allow you to feel with your genuine emotions, like we're just talking and because of that - some Facebook or Twitter, or any of these things would interrupt our interesting conversation, should be blocked. Why are apps designed on the ideal of interrupting you during the day when they should just be part of you? 

Mike Walsh: For you slow technology is more about being present, as opposed to a slow signal?

Tariq Krim: Yes. Going against the, what I call the ‘plus one innovation’. If you go every year to the Mobile World Congress, you will see the plus one. So you had the S5 and now you just do plus one, you have the S6. Is it better? Is it generally different? No. It's just ...

Mike Walsh: What's worse, when it's the plus half. Like it's the 5S.

Tariq Krim: Usually they say the half part are better than, you know the 5S is usually a better version than the ... But you know what I mean - its like suddenly, when people saw the iPad sales plummeting people just discovered, do I really need to buy an iPad every two years? I offered my mum an iPad 2 and it's perfectly good. It still works well. The phones are also pretty good I think. What needs to change is the relation we have with the technology and the apps. It's still very hard because there's a competition for attention.

Mike Walsh: It's also very different to, I guess the European concept of a consumer good which should improve with age and get better through use. In some ways there's a difference in the design approaches of Silicon Valley versus Europe.

Tariq Krim: It's planned obsolescence. It has an impact on the ecology as well, because we take a great deal of materials to build these things. That's why I'm intrigued by the idea of Raspberry Pi, built in Europe. Even with Jolicloud our idea was initially to say we build a CloudOS and that CloudOS will sit in your old computer, but in the meantime that was one other struggle I had with the company is we were explaining that we can use this old computer and you can put a new OS. It's based on Linux, it's super fast, it uses Chrome, it's the faster browser, you are connected to the future. You don't need to put more money in hardware, but people were still lining up because they want the new thing.

We live in a hyper consumerist era. I think when I see Louis Vuitton and I see Apple - they are like similar companies. They are creating a luxury product, specialized retail, great marketing, but that is all about consuming.

Mike Walsh: What happens to these products later, it always intrigues me. When I lived in Hong Kong there's a whole established market for last season's hand bags. There's a very famous store there called Milan Station, where you could actually buy, at 70% of the value of whatever the handbag was being sold last season. Of course when it comes to our technologies, you always wonder what happens to our phones when we don't use them anymore. A lot of them get sold to the third world and emerging markets, but we don't often, as you did with Jolicloud, think about how  we optimize software to make these devices more useful.

Tariq Krim: There's two questions. If you think about the Google vision that is basically the phone being an antenna, your Android phone is a Google antenna, it tracks everything. Now you can move just half an inch and it will be detected. It's insane, so if you're nervous and you have your phone in your hand, and you're just moving it, shaking your phone, Apple or Google will know about it. They can, at some point advertise not only based on where you are and who you are, but also on what your state of mind is. 

I think it's why when I see the wearables market, I think - they're exciting, but also scary because how can you say a company like Google selling McDonald and Kraft food products, that are bad for your health. In the same time tells you, the Google wearable tells you that they are going to make you a better, healthier person. Same company. There are a lot of paradoxes that we need to think about.

The idea that the future of culture is just that. One of our French ministers said that, and I was shocked, that the future of culture is an algorithm telling you which book you should read based on what you read before. If this is culture I want to shoot myself right now.

Mike Walsh: It's even more worse if the algorithm actually wrote the book.

Tariq Krim: Yes. Probably a lot of it ... You know there is this story about how now computerized algorithms can respond in blog post, but that one day everything that you would read will have been generated by computers.

There's nothing that has a value. It's crazy. I signed a petition about the danger of AI and Elon Musk signed it, Bill Gates signed it, because I'm scared about the world where we ... I don't believe man will be replaced by a machine, but I think the machine will have an impact by removing the pain. By removing everything that is hard in life, but just put us in like ... We're going to be living vegetables, connected living vegetables. 

I'm scared of that option, you know? Right now, you're in any city, you walk the dog and you have a leash. But now your the dog and the leash is connected to your GPS. The Google GPS just tells you, you should go there and there and there, and you don't even question it, because if you're in Prague or Tokyo, especially in Tokyo where you can't actually read anything, you just follow the direction  ...

Mike Walsh: It's quite hard making that argument I guess where your surrounded by techno-optimists. We were talking before and you said it's almost this kind of religion now, where if it's mobile and it's an app it must be good, it must save the world, and it must be cool.

Tariq Krim: Yes. Evgeny Morozov is an interesting writer, he wrote about it and called it Solutionism. His book is funny, it's called To Save The World Click Here. I think we are in age where we are older, we're not in our 20s anymore, but I find fascinating that most of the apps that are designed today for people to communicate are either written by very young engineers, and also a lot of people that have awkward social communication.

You know geeks who don't really, I would say usually Asperger types actually, are building the apps to let us communicate more. I just found this paradox very interesting, but also I don't think when you go into Google, or when you go into Apple you also get stuck in a vision of the world that has been designed by a very small amount of people.

One of the reason I did Jolicloud and not building an app was, I wanted to build an interface. I wanted to build a global proposition. I didn't want to write on someone else rules. 

Today if you go on Google, if you go on Apple, you have to follow all these rules. I found it interesting as an entrepreneur. Right now is the best time ever to be an entrepreneur. You have so many rules to follow if you want to do an app, if you want to be successful, if you want to grow your business. Sometimes I just, screw the rules, just do whatever you want. I hope that the next iteration of technology will be people building, not a copy of Gmail, but a world where we don't have to live in this bureaucracy, because everyday you wake up, you have to answer your emails, no matter what. If you don't like photos on your friends Facebook or Instagram, they believe you don't love them anymore. Then you have to go and rate all the stuff. You suddenly have to be socially active in your digital footprint. 

I think this is exhausting us. That energy we spend is not spent on creating, on becoming our self, becoming generally our self, that is what technology was supposed to do. When I started, iPhone technology was supposed to help me grow as a person and be myself. Now I feel that technology is about reducing people to just self expression, photos on Instagram, and just trying to be generic.

Mike Walsh: Our tools have not only become our masters, they're actually forcing us to do activities which are not in our best interest, which serve a broader purpose, whether it's selling more advertising, or collecting more data.

Tariq Krim: We were talking just before about quality of content. Now when everybody speaks about everything all the time. The funny thing is now with Wikipedia you could have a basic knowledge about everything. When you talk to true experts, the first thing that I love about true experts when they talk about any subject, it's not as easy as it seems, because the truth is whatever subject you're into, it's never as easy as it seems. Now, we've created that sense of simplicity everything is simple, you will be able to do this and that. Everybody can be a photographer, everybody can be a musician, everybody can become an journalist. Remember citizen journalism?

Mike Walsh: I worry when we get more contextual computing and wearables all linked to reality, everyone is going to be a dinner party expert, but they'll all be telling the same jokes and stories, because there will be whatever quote of the day is being served up to a million other people in the same context.

Tariq Krim: That's happening already with Facebook. If you look at timeline on Facebook, it's fascinating, because first I am connected to so many interesting people and yet everything I have daily on my timeline is just crap. The reason is if you have to associate advertising with companies you will find the lowest common denominator.

It's like what I call the music choice party paradox. The reason why everyone listens to Michael Jackson during a party is because it has the lowest common denominator, because if you start to be more trendy, or something more specialized, everybody will just get off  the dance floor, and say, what's this? If you put on "Beat It", everybody will come back. It's kind of a junction. Now we have this kind of paradox on Facebook. To actually create attention and to create content that I can be socially distributed to a wide number of people, you need to lower the quality of the content, you need to lower the narrative and the stories. 

If you look you always have the ten reason why she's missing you. You have all these stupid titles. People like Buzzfeed and the media, I believe, took advantage of this.

We're looking constantly for guidance instead of just taking the time to breath and say, well this is who I am and I'm not perfect and I want to live in this world and this is what I want to do. These are the fields of expertise that I want to have. I think if you look in the early 20th Century, a lot of the great things that came out were through people that actually decided generally to become themselves. In science, making decisions, in literature. I don't see that anymore. I feel like we're constantly pressured to become like everyone else.

Mike Walsh: If the answer is slow technology, what are you planning on doing in the next couple of years to either personally, or as an entrepreneur, take advantage of this potential?

Tariq Krim: I've been investing quite a lot of time in culture and the process. I'm a big believer in tools. Better tools. For example on my iPad I use very minimalistic writing tools now. Trying to use a distraction free platform. We're working right now on a project we call the library.

The library is to provide every single individual with his personal general library of content that is yours, your library. Your story of content and interaction with content is different from mine. Unless it's our common mutual values. I'm trying to see if technology can actually make us more ... Can really empower us as individuals rather than being our connected sheep, because that's what I feel we're becoming every day, but it's very hard because you go against the trend. I'm into trends in a big way, but I think when you talk to people and tell them that you don't really care about the new iPhone, you don't really care about the Apple watch, they don't get it. I'm actually more excited by the Pebble because it come from a smaller company who has a vision where what I think ...

Mike Walsh: ...who are more connected to their customers.

Tariq Krim: Yes. When Apple is more like, I wouldn't say a defensive move, but Apple needs to show the market that they can sell additional product. The iPad is not this new thing, so we need to find something else. The problem as well also for me is that these companies have values that I don't respect anymore. They don't pay their taxes in France, in Europe, in the US. They just pile up cash in the Virgin Islands, in the tax haven. They don't really inject the money back, in the case of Apple, in the US economy as much as they should.

We all care about the environment, but the fact that we produce a turnover of hundreds of millions of phones every year is bad for the environment no matter what you say. We don't use conflict free minerals. It means that we have to buy from killers in the Congo, their minerals. We're destroying Bolivia, with lithium. We're basically about to destroy the sea of Japan for rare earth, because China is hungry to get more. 

I'm excited about what Elon Musk is doing with Tesla, or even SpaceX - because these are a bigger vision. They're not a government based vision. It's not for the collective, it's still a private based company, but they have a bigger vision expanding. I wonder why Apple is not doing anything in the space. They don't have a Project Loom, like Google has. They don't have the Internet.org. They just about collecting money in expensive retail places and that really bothers me, because that's not the Apple II that I had when I was a kid. That was not the original vision. Now it's only about cash.

I generally believe that whoever will create brands with a social vision will be extremely successful. Look at the Raspberry Pi, five million raspberry Pi sold. It's unbelievable, it's a $35 computer, you can run Windows, or Linux now. Then you build your own case. I'm actually looking to build a case for the Jolicloud computer, where the case will be built in refugee camps, because it's very easy to build, but at least you would pay a ethical price to get this thing built. I just love the idea of the computer of the future built partly in Africa. I just love that idea.

Mike Walsh: I do too. Tariq your club sandwich has arrived and it looks amazing, so let's leave it there, but thank you very much for speaking to me.

Tariq Krim: Thank you very much.