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The Idea Man by Paul Allen

April 24, 2011

Just read the Idea Man by Paul Allen.  I don’t usually review books and certainly not here on my blog.  And this post is not really a review as much as it is a commentary.

The first 50% of the book deals mostly with Paul’s experiences with Bill Gates including the formation of Microsoft and the first  seven years of it’s  existence until  Paul left Microsoft (although he stayed on the boad until 2000).  I am eight yeas older than Paul and ten year older than Bill but our computer careers started about the same time (the second half of the 60s),  so I can relate very much to many of the experiences that Paul discussed about that time. I enjoyed Paul reminiscing about his feelings when he saw a transistor for the first time or what it was like to use a ASR-33 teletype for programing.  So the early part of the book was like “home week” for me..

Paul’s description of his relationship with Bill Gates rang true as did his description of Bill himself.   I meet Bill the first time in 1981 when I was at Digital Equipment Corp.  Bill was 26 by then. IBM had brought out the IBM PC and Microsoft was marketing  MS DOS.  We interacted  a few time  over  the next several years. From about 1992 to the time I left Intel in 1999, I had much more contact with him.  I meet Paul Allen during the 90s.  I certainly had a lot less interaction  with him and he did not impress me. I use to call him the richest 80 thousand-dollar-a-year programer in the world.

The book is an attempt to demonstrate that Paul actually played an imporant role in creating Microsoft i.e. he was the “idea man” and Bill was the “implementor” and therefore he played an  important role in creating the computer industry.  I think this  is probably true from what I read but Paul tries to demonstrate that the relationship was balanced and he contributed as much to Microsoft as  Bill.  This I doubt. There could have been many Paul Allen’s but there is only one Bill Gates (thank god).

Then there is the part of his story that deals with his first diagnoise of Cancer ( Hodgkin’s lymphoma).  I could easily relate to that having my own bout with cancer (although at a much later stage of my life). Later, he discusses his second cancer ( non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma). Paul also suffers from heart problems and has a pacemaker.

There is a lot about his investments in the second part of the book.  I have to say that during the 90s Paul was considered “dumb money” by many in the venture business.  He describes his investments and I think is pretty open about what went well and what went badly but you can tell that while Paul had a pretty good insight into what would happen in the future,  his  judgment about timing was pretty bad.  Also, I don’t think he was a good judge of people. Most importantly, he was spread way to thin.  Paul does not explain why he made these investments.  He was/is extremely rich.  Did he do this for money or to influence  the future?   I thought he was very honest about his investment in Interval. I had a lot of dealings with Interval.  There was a lot of value in the concept but the implementation was problem.  Again, Paul was not on top of what was happening.

I skipped over his discussion of investing in sport teams.  I have no interest in sports.  He discusses his involvement in entertainment. I was glad to see that he now realizes that he was “taken”  by SKG Dreamworks although I am surprised that he actually made money on his investment.

There was a lot about his philanthropic efforts.  Again, you can see he is all over the map.  It is interesting to compare the Gates Foundation with the Allen Foundation.

There is little about his personal life as  an adult.  He mentions two girl friends in the book.  This link  has some speculations.  When I was active in “Hollywood” in the 90s, I heard some stories but who knows if they are true.   Then again, there are some interesting stories about Bill and show girls. I always thought of Paul as a pretty lonely guy.  I remember that once I was in Portofino, maybe around 1997,   with the woman in my life at that time.  Paul showed up in one of his Yacht’s -  the  Méduse.  He was by himself.  I thought about saying hello but was afriad he would ask us to join him on his Yacht.  Paul was rich but in my opinion not very interesting.  We walked the other way.

Then there is Paul the consumer. The way he spends money is distasteful.  He appears to live like I imagine Donald Trump would like to live.  And sadly, I think there are a lot of hangers-on.   I once stood next to Paul at an Allen Conference (Herb Allen who is not a relation to Paul)  and listen to Paul discuss Yacht building with a woman I did not know.  The woman asked if he had a Helicopter Port on his boat.  Paul looked at her as if she was from Mars and said ” where else could you put your Helicopter?”.  He then told her that his boat had two. I wanted to puke.

Paul clearly wrote this book to demonstrate that he was and is relevant.  He was of course, and after reading this book, I raised his salarly.  He is now the richest 100 thousand-dollar-a-year programer in the world.

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Intel Alumni Panel Discussion

February 10, 2011

Last month, I chaired a panel at an event held by the Intel Alumni Group.  Like many companies with strong cultures, the alumni still identify with the company and therefore with each other.  It was an unusual event for me. I had not participated in any high tech event in some ten years with this one exception.  While at Intel, I had been a very active participant at industry events as a key note speaker, speaker, panelist and panel chair.  The Intel PR people found that I was “user friendly” and I realized that the difference between being a dreamer and a visionary was having a PR dept so I cooperated.  In fact, I loved public speaking.  But after I left Intel  in 1999, I no longer had a platform or anyone  to pay for my expenses to attend conferences.    I am still not sure why I agreed to chair the panel  Maybe it was because I feel I owe Intel much and the much of the Intel that I owe is now alumni.  But probably it was just that I was asked and asked in such a nice way by Bruce Schechter, the founder and president of the Intel Alumni Network.  A summary of the event with photos can be seen here.

I had two  key requirement. The first  was that I  could pick the panel.  I knew from my past experience that the purpose of a panel (or a talk) is not only to provide information but also to provide entertainment.  I am pretty good at both of these but probably better at the later.  So in order to do that I had to pick people that I knew to have opinions and most importantly attitude. Here is a link to the bios for the panel members. The second was that the panel discussion would be video taped and made available on the Internet. You can see it here.

I decided to break the panel discussion into three parts.  The first part was the question:  In what way did you experience at Intel help you to become an entrepreneur or early stage investor.  The second questions was:  In what way did your experience at Intel not prepare you to become an entrepreneur and/or early stage investor.  The third question had to do with follow on interest by the group  in the topic of venture investing.

The event had a pretty big turn out by the standards of the other Alumni events.  And many  former senior executives attended.  I was amazed that Andy Grove actually came.  I was very happy to see him and was very pleased when he later send an email to Bruce complimenting the panel discussion  (I had not gotten very many compliments from him during my time at Intel).  But it was also sad to see how frail  Andy  had become.  He suffers from Parkinson Disease. I am sure his mind (and his tongue) is as sharp as ever and he must be so frustrated by his physical disabilities.

The video is the best way to understand the panel discussion.  It starts at the 12th minutes. Prior to that is the normal introduction stuff and a brief speech by Ted Jenkins one of the first Intel Employees.  He spoke about Intel as a start up which may be of interest to some of you.  Here is a link to a paper the Ted co wrote on the early days.

One of the thing I had to consider when talking about Intel was the life cycle of the company.  The company  was founded in 1968.  Intel had two lives. The first was as the leader in semi conductor memory.  The second was at the leader in microprocessors.  The memory business had been under attach in the early 80s by Japaneses companies.  The survival of Intel was at stake.  The companies revenue was under a billion dollars.  That is when one of the bravest and most significant management decisions was ever taken. Gordon Moore and  Andy Grove decided to get out of the memory business and become an microprocessor company which meant laying off more than a third of the company. In my opinion, the company had an opportunity in the mid 90s to have a third life as  Network/Internet company but there was no one at the company left capable of leading that transition. Here is a link to a time line of the company.    So in thinking about how the Intel experience informed people, it is  important to keep in mind when the person was working at the company.

I have often been critical of Intel but I have great respect for the company and what I learned there.  Andy really appreciated it when I said during the panel discussion that I find myself trying to teaching entrepreneurs to do the things I would not do when I was at Intel.

The panel generally felt that the experience of working at Intel provided them with with the skills to be more a board member or an advisor to an early stage company than  to be the entrepreneur that  started it.  That makes sense since Intel was a pretty large company when everyone on the panel work there.  It is hard for someone that works for a large company to start or go to an early stage company.  It seems that there are very few successful companies that were started by former Intel employees.

Towards the end of the panel there was a discussion about what happened to Intel and how the culture had changed.  It was pretty interesting but maybe had a little too much Intel bashing.

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Why companies fail to make transitions

June 23, 2010
Here  is a pretty interesting link to an article on the future of Microsoft.  Frankly, the only thing that surprises me about the prediction that Microsoft will decline into insignificance is that it will take this long.  I have seen this movie before and I will probably see it again.
I have personally watch and participated in  the first two of the major waves of computing which I describe below.
  • The first one was proprietary   vertical  computing represented by mainframe companies like IBM and mini Computer Companies like Digital Equipment.  These companies did everything themselves (hardware and system software and some application software).  Apple is the only contemporary company that resembles this structure.  IBM is still around but mainly a systems integrator.  Digital was acquired by Compaq in 1998.
  • The second one was the age of the personal computer.  It was a horizontal structure where a few companies dominated the various hardware and software layers (Intel had more than 80% of the microprocessor business and close to 100% of the profits while Microsoft had about the same in the OS and dominated some of the application layers with their office products.  At one time both Intel and Microsoft were the most valuable companies in the world. Now Wintel, once the most feared force in computing is no longer relevant.
  • The third one is network computing and is led by Google although we have to deal with Apple a bit later.  In this wave, the value has moved to the network and expanded encroach on the media industries.  Much of the value is created by the consumers themselves.  Advertising plays a key part in the monetization of this wave.
  • The fourth wave will surly come even if I for one can not yet imagine what it is (although I try).  And Google and the other companies riding the crest of the networking world will suffer the same faith as their predecessors.
Apple is amazing in that it has survived the first two waves and is dealing extremely well in the third wave.  I will write more about Apple another time.
So why can companies not make it through these transitions?  It is pretty simple:  They would have to take the lead in destroying their own business.  And if they were successful, they would see a reduction in profits at least at first.  I know that if you give an CEO  two choices, 1) continue as is with the knowledge that eventually your business will decline significantly and even fail or 2) take a hit now with the possibility that your business will recover in the long-term, they will choose 3) continue as it is and believe that you will figure out  how to maintain the business. In other words they can not accept the future as it will be.  This is not only true for businesses but also sadly for countries.  The USA is  Microsoft I am afraid (but further along in its decline).

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My first hacks

May 24, 2010

In 1965, at the age of 20, I was living in Paris.  It was very expensive to call the USA.  My friend, Mike, and I heard that there was a tape recorder that had just hit the market in Germany which was portable.  So we went to a German border town. I don’t remember the name but the hotel we stayed in was called the “Bunker Hotel”.  You get the picture!
In those days, the telephone operators knew how much you deposited by the sounds of the different kinds of coins.  So we recorded the sounds that were needed to make a 3 minute call to the USA from Paris.  Then when the operator said (in French of course), deposit x number of Francs, we played back series of sounds.
The second hack, was by passing our electric meter.  We lived in a building with a concierge.  The meter reader would come by one a month.  We would get a notice from the concierge that if we were not home we should leave our key with him so he could let the meter reader in.  I would un-do the by pass. When the meter reader arrive, he would see that we had used no electricity (we had jackets  and candles).  The good news was that we had an electric hot water heater and a shower (which was very unusual in Paris at that time).  We put up ads at the Paris Conservatory of Music (where we were both taking classes) that we would provide any female students with free showers.

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The Road Behind

May 24, 2010

The Road Ahead

There is an interesting review of Bill Gate’s pedictions from his book “The Road Ahead”.

Bill Gates was never very good at seeing the technology future.  Frankly, I was not impressed with his understanding of technology. And what I found scary was that he believed that he was a technology visionary.  While I meet him in 1980, it was not until 1993 until 1999 that I interacted with him often.  He definitely did not have a good sense of the consumer market and was especially poor at understanding networking.
What Microsoft was good at  was copying other companies ideas (some would say selling and in some cases that would be true).  This pretty much came to a halt with the government investigation of Microsoft for anti trust,
Bill’s greatest error was thinking that people (the government) that were not as smart as he was could control what he did with his company.

In 2000 Bill stepped down as CEO giving that position to Steve Balmer who definitely is not a visionary.  Bill must have realized that it was not going to be as much fun anymore.  He was so right about that.  And to Bill’s great credit, he and his wife Melinda started the Gates foundation.  He continued to play a strategy and technology role until her finally left all together in July of 2008.

He did leave behind a cash generating machine which continues to make enormous amounts of money by selling products it either copied or bought and buy successfully locking in customers.

Now, I am not sure there were other CEOs of Bill’s vintage that were better at making prediction about the future.  I certainly do not think at Steve Jobs was better.  What Steve did better was invent the future which is more important that predicting it.

I wish I had written down my prediction fifteen years ago.  I am find them in various speeches, article and interviews and it looks like I was pretty good but probably everyone one that thinks of themselves as some kind of “futurist” has selective memory   What I was not good at doing was influencing my former company, Intel, to take advantage of the changes that I correctly saw.

Predicting the future is meaningless if it does not effect change which means influencing the future.

I use to say when I was an executive at Intel,  “the future is to important to be left to chance” but I was mostly talking to myself.

Maybe I will write down my predictions for the next 15 years.  I will be eighty when I can see how well I did.

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If I was seven year old now and had an iPad

May 23, 2010

Today, while my wife was having a tennis lesson, I waited for her in the car.  During this time, I took another class on iTunes U on evolution via my iPad.   When she came back, my wife noted how amazing it was that I could take a course  along with actual Yale students.  I agreed it was amazing  and my first reaction was that I was amazed that I could still keep up with these students.  Then I began to think of my own youth and how I educated myself and how different it would be if I was seven years old now (the same age as my oldest grandson) had an iPad and access to the Internet.

Stanford Home for Convalescent Children

So a bit of background:  I was very asthmatic as a child.  My early life was a struggle to breath.  From the time I was a baby, I was constantly being rushed to the hospital.  I was constantly absent from school and I doubt that I was there half of the time.  At the age of seven, I was sent for a year to the Standford Home for  Convalescent  Children.  The location is  actually now the Ronald McDonald House. The Home became the Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital.   I spent my time there   primarily alone with only my imagination for company.  When I got out I was pretty much a social misfit and continued with being absent from school.  The other kids did not like me very much primarily for my political and religious views which were every changing and always extreme.  I was accused of being a communists (I was probably nine years old). It was the time of the McCarthy hearings.  I was also an atheists.  So I spent all my time in the library reading books.  The only other technology that I had to help educate me was the radio. I also build my own crystal set .   I use to listen to science programs.  I also had a chemestry set which was taken away by my parents when I  created a small bomb that blew up part of the basement.  An I also had a microscope.

I had to think about how different my life would be if I was that same kid now.  How the whole world would have been opended to me via a computer or a device like the iPad.  I would have been able to learn so much more. Or would have I have had a social life on the internet? Or maybe I would have turned to playing games and not learned a thing.  Those of you that have young children now will certainly have thoughts about this which I  hope you share them.  But keep in mind I was not your normal healty and socially adjusted kid.  I was a sickly nerd in the making.

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The iPad: Not quiet the future but getting close

February 7, 2010

I have been waiting for the iPad announcement for sometime.  The wait was good because it allowed me to use my imagination thinking about what it might be.  As my readers know, I have been working with computers since 1966 and for many years, I was able to even had some non trivial effect on the development of the PC industry particularly with respect to the development of residential broadband.  I had a vision of the connected PC becoming a new medium for entertainment, education and communication and commerce.  It pretty much played out as I thought, spoke and wrote about in the 90s.  Wireless technologies were just beginning to make themselves felt when I left my position as Vice President of Business Development at Intel Corp. in April of 1999.  I had one of the first Blackberries and installed one of the first wifi networks at the World Headquarters of The Avram Miller Company (me and three assistance).  At that time, I thought that the PC  and MAC would move into the entertainment center of homes.  But things did not play out as I thought. I mean I could personally build a home media center but both the cost and more importantly the complexity made the development of the PC based home media center out of the reach of most consumers.  And of course, Microsoft was not really the company to lead this development.  My former company, Intel, lacked both the vision and the ability to do much (even thought it was pretty much mission critical for Intel in my opinion).  Apple  would not try to do much in this area because given the complexity issues and the need to deal with cable companies etc, they would not be able to deliver on their brand promise.  It was a good decision for Apple.

In the meantime, we had move and more of the computer applications moving to the Cloud.  I became convinced that we would ended with a number of devices in the home that connected to each other via the internet.  Last year, I got an iPod and also moved from the PC to the Mac.  I could no longer take all the problems I got using Microsoft software.  Now I am Microsoft free.  But I did not expect to have a trans-formative experience using the iPhone.  I thought that the iPhone would be a utilitarian product for me.  It would be used to keep my calendar, address book and deal with email as well as phone communications.  And yes, it would be my iPod but I was not that much into using an iPod type device.  Instead, I found that it was a major form of entertainment.  Even with the small screen, I would watch TV shows, movies etc when I  traveled.  And I loved the intimacy of the touch screen.  I began to realize that this was indeed personal computing and that the subjective relationship between myself and this piece of equipment was different than I had with a notebook or desktop computer.  My iPhone also started becoming my controller for things like the lighting in my home and  the control of my AV system.  I noticed that I cared my iPhone with me all the time.

So when I began to hear the rumors of an iPad, I realized that this might be the device that would really transform entertainment.  In the 90s I was found of saying that the PC was the Black Hole of Technology. That anything that came close to the PC (like word processors) would fall into the PC and become part of the PC.   The iPhone and devices like it has become the black hole of the pocket or purse and are sucking functionality into it like camera, phone, utilities etc.  So would the iPad become the black hole for media?  I think it can be.  I beleive the exerience of watching entertainment with a device that you can hold but more importantly that you can touch will change the perspective on the entertainment experience in very powerful ways.

But I was also disappointment in some of the specs of the iPad and wonder if Apple is making trade offs that are based on getting the product out at the right price and more importantly at the right quality or are they based on business strategies that limit the iPad to benefit other Apple products.  For instance the lack of a face forward camera means it can not be used for video conferencing.  But I think that is a very important capability for this product.  I want to be able to communicate with my kids and grand kids that way as I do now on my mac book pro (or mac book air when I travel).  I also think that video communications will be important in playing network based games or even sharing entertainment experiences with friends.    I am very interested in the book reading experience.  I use a Kindle all the time and love it.   I  was disappointed that there was no real GPS capability.

I think the iPad will be a great product for seniors like my father who will soon be 87 and has some difficulty dealing with his PC.  But unfortunately, you have to have a PC or Mac if you have an iPad so you can run iTunes making things more complicated.  I hope there is a work around for this.

Anyway, I can’t wait to get my iPad.  Not sure if I will wait for the 3G model.

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Music and the PC

September 11, 2009
only been at this for fifty years

only been at this for fifty years

I just got a link (and an email) from Stanly Jungleib who founded Seer Systems and was responsible for the development of the first professional software synthesizer. Stanley had been a member of the group that founded MIDI which is a industry protocol that is still used (I use it almost every day) represent music.  I had forgotten my own role in the development of software synthesizers until Stanley’s email.  It brought back a lot of memories.

I got started using computers because of my interest in music. Getting into music rather late at the age of 15,   I thought of myself more as a composer/arranger than pianist back then.  But I was really interested in Jazz which is improvised.  In late 1966 when I went to work for Joe Kamiya at  the Langley Porter Institute doing the first work in brain wave bio feedback, I began to think that I could somehow combine physiological information such as EEG, GSR , heart rate etc to get feedback from an audience and couple that with a real time computer musical improvisation program.  Of course, at the time, the computer we used   had a memory smaller than a one photo on the iPhone and probably had as much computing power as a remote control for a TV but that did not stop me from dreaming.

I continued my interest in using computer for music creation.  Sometime around 1990 I joined the board of OpCode Systems a leader in the music software industry.  I was a Vice President at Intel at the time and OpCode’s products only ran on the Mac which used the PowerPC microprocessor. This was a bit of a problem but did not keep me from having a Mac in my music studio.  I also joined a group call MuSig which was user group focused on Midi that was founded by Glenn Spencer, a music teacher (one of my teachers).  Glenn introduced me to Stanley.  Stanley and I had a number of conversations.  At that time, we at Intel lead by the Intel Architectural Labs was working on a series of technology to turn the PC (remember this was around 1991) in to a multi media platform.  My group at Intel (which became Intel Capital) shared this vision and was investing in a number of early stage companies that could help with this.  A key part of the strategy was called NSP (for native signal processing).  The idea was to use the main CPU instead of dedicated chips (especially DSP’s).  In a sense it was a way to sell more powerful microprocessors (made of course by Intel) but it also had the important benefit of making the functionality software based instead of hardcoded.  This flexibility proved critical in the development of multimedia capabilities.  I can’t remember perfectly, but I must have introduced Stanley to the Labs and also assigned someone to work on making a small investment in his company.  The result was one of the first (if not the first) software synth.  Andy Grove actually demonstrated Seer synth at Codex in 1994.  By 1995, Microsoft was putting major pressure on Intel to stop developing software.  I won’t go into it  although you can read a bit about it here. Intel caved to Microsoft aggression.  Much of the NSP projects were killed including the one with Seer.  Seer went off to do a deal with Creative Labs which was the major supplier of sound boards for the PC.  I left the board of OpCode around the same time.  Glenn died in 1998.  That was pretty much the end of my involvment with music technology.

Now I am back on a Mac.  I use Garage Band and Logic Express.  I am able to do things I could only dream about back in the day.  I even have music creation programs on my iPhone.

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Goodbye Geocities and thanks for everything

April 24, 2009

Goodbye Geocities!  Yahoo has just announced that it is shutting down Geocities.  I wanted to say goodbye.  We (Intel Capital) made an early investment in Geocities  (maybe 1997).  I remember the meeting where I first learned about it.   One of the  people in my organization  invited me to a meeting to discuss Geocities with the venture group that was the main investor in Geocities (about 50%), @venture.  @venture was the the VC arm of CMGI.  The meeting was attended by the CEO of CMGI, Dave Wetherell, and Peter Mills who headed up @venture. The Geocities concept at the time really took my imagination.  The idea was that people would stake out virtual real estate and build a presence there (kind of like Second Life without the avatars.  The kind of real estate you owned and its location had different values. Users were called homesteaders.  Neighborhoods were created to focus on different topics. It was really the beginning of user created content and social networking.  The meeting turned out to be an extremely important one to both Intel and to me personally.  Not only did I get very excited about the potential of Geocities and the general concept it represented but I got very excited about @ventures and their various investments.  I was particularly impressed with Dave Wetherell and learned that he was able to start @ventures with the money that CMGI had made from being an early investor in what was maybe the first browser company (can’t remember the name) which was sold soon after the investment to AOL.  I was extremely impressed with Wetherell’s vision.  After that meeting, I got Intel’s agreement to make a significant investment into CMGI (December of 1997).  It was the first time we invested in a company that invested in early stage ventures (we always wanted to do that directly).  Our agreement provided for Intel to also have the opportunity to co invest with CMGI in early stage companies.  I became a board observer (at that time Intel did not want to have board positions in companies we invested in do to perceived legal issues…..they no longer feel that way).  Being a board observer with CMGI provided me with a lot of insight in the development of consumer Internet which was my main passion.  I played an active role with the company and when I left Intel in April 1999 (ten years ago!), I was asked to join the board of CMGI . That worked out for me pretty well.  The company soon had a 40 billion dollar valuation  and I was able to sell all my vested shares at the peak. Then the bubble burst and that combined with varrious management issues prevented CMIG from executing the vision that Dave had for the Internet. But it did not work out badly for Intel.  Intel sold a major part of its  Geocities stock to Yahoo prior and during the acquisition of Geocites by Yahoo for about three billion dollars after the company had first gone public.  I guess (can’t remember) that Intel made over a  billion dollars in its investments in CMGI and Geocities.  Not sure how things worked out for Yahoo after the acquisition. Obviously, it did not work out in the long term but maybe it helped Yahoo develop its stong consumer position which it unfortunately did not maximize these last years.

The story of Geocities is important in looking at companies like Facebook, Twitter, Second Life etc.  I also suspect there are going to be a lot of sad people mourning the lost of this very important company.

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The effectiveness of PSA Testing

March 20, 2009

There was an interesting editiorial in the NYT today.  As a man who was treated for Prostate cancer  over 12  years ago, I often said that I had PSA disease.  The problem in my opinion is not having PSA tests done. It is what happens after the results come back positive.   The PSA test can provide a lot of value in determining if someone has prostate cancer and to a certain extent how aggressive  that cancer may be particularly if the PSA is monitored over a period of time.  The rate of change of PSA is an important indicator.  The problem is that when a PSA is above a certain level (they were using 4.0 when I had my first PSA done at the age of 50 years), the next step is often a Biopsy to determine if there is cancer and to grade the Cancer. This is where the problem really comes into play.  If cancer is detected (and the older you are the better chance that you will have some amount of prostate cancer), the next step is for the doctor to recommend ways for you to treat it. Top of the list is surgery followed by radiation of some time.  My doctors do not really treat the possibility of what is called “watchful waiting” especially if you are young.  Doctors  do not want to take the chance that you, their patient, may be one of the people that have an aggressive form of the disease.  The idea is that if the cancer is found early and the prostate removed or totally cooked with radiation, then you can no longer get prostate cancer.  But even that is not always true.  There is not just one kind of prostate cancer.  Many prostate cancers grow very slowly and many never spread beyond the prostate (it has to do that to become dangerous).  Frankly, I wish I never had treated my prostate cancer (I had radiation) but watched and waited (by monitoring the PSA and maybe having a biopsy ever few years) but at the age of 51 no doctor would have recommended that approach.

The good news is that i am pretty sure within ten years we will be able to determine of a man has an aggressive form of the disease or one that can be left alone which would be most cases.  I also think we will find ways to deal more effectively with advanced prostate cancer which will mean that the cost of taking the risk will be reduced.

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