Scott Hartley is a venture capitalist and author of THE FUZZY AND THE TECHIE

Scott Hartley is a venture capitalist and author of THE FUZZY AND THE TECHIE, a Financial Times business book of the month, and finalist for the Financial Times and McKinsey & Company's Bracken Bower Prize for an author under 35. He has served as a Presidential Innovation Fellow at the White House, a Partner at Mohr Davidow Ventures (MDV), and a Venture Partner at Metamorphic Ventures. Prior to venture capital, Scott worked at Google, Facebook, and Harvards Berkman Center for Internet & Society. He has been a contributing author at MIT Press, and has written for publications such as the Financial Times,Forbes,and Foreign Policy, and been featured in Harvard Business Review and The Wall Street Journal.He holds three degrees from Stanford and Columbia, has finished six marathon and Ironman 70.3 triathlons.

Hartley first heard the terms Fuzzy and Techie while studying political science at Stanford University. At Stanford, if you majored in the humanities or social sciences, you were a Fuzzy. If you majored in the computer sciences, you were a Techie. According to Hartley, this informal division has mistakenly created a business mindset and believes Techies are the real drivers of innovation. Hartley believes that the Fuzzies, not the Techies, are the key talent responsible for creating the most successful new business ideas. The Fuzzies will develop ethics in artificial intelligence, question bias in algorithms and data and will bring contextual understanding to code, said Hartley.

Here are some of the Fuzzies referenced in Hartleys book:

A global study found that adoption of artificial intelligence will create several new job categories requiring very important skills that may surprise most. These new jobs fall into three categories:

MIT Sloan Management Review

Here is a short video of Author Anne-Marie Slaughter, speaking to graduates and referencing Hartleys book, noting that even in our STEM-obsessed world, we need humanists at the center of technology and industry.

To learn more about the power of Liberal Arts in shaping the future of work and the digital economy, Ray Wang and I invited Scott Hartley to our weekly show DisrupTV, where we feature the best and brightest business leaders, bestselling authors, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists to discuss emerging technologies, business and leadership trends that will most impact our society.

Here are some of the key takeaways from our conversation with Hartley:

Democratization of technology is an advantage for creatives - As a venture capitalists, meeting with entrepreneurs and startup founders, Hartley began to notice that team building and cultivating a culture of innovation requires storytelling, creativity, empathy and Liberal Arts oriented skills and background. Hartley reminds us that today, tools have been democratized, so what you need most now is to be a full-stack integrator. The ability to code is less of prerequisite.

Education is not a plane ticket. Education is not about going from point-A to point-B. Education is more like a passport, where you are trying to get stamps from all different places. If you are really passionate about tech courses, you should also expand your purview to include non-technical curriculum. Get out of your comfort zone, collect the stamps, and build a well-rounded point of view. Hartley references philosophical questions that drove early design decisions at some of the fastest and most successful companies.

Software is feeding the world - Hartley quoted Kara Swisher where she said: San Francisco entrepreneurs is assisted living for the millennials, referencing the startup marketplace that is replicating services Moms use to deliver like laundry delivery, dog walkers, and food delivery. The changing consumer behavior and expectations dictate a greater need for the combination of Fuzzies and Techies skill-sets to build better products and services.

Robust AI algorithms are a function of diversity of input - Hartley remind us that product teams often learn from edge user cases which is often overlooked without a diverse set of inputs. Often the most important product and service design decisions are based on diverse set of human inputs, minimizing the biases that can be easy introduced in data sets and algorithms.

I highly encourage you to read THE FUZZY AND THE TECHIE and to watch our full conversation with Scott Hartley. In the video, Hartley provided numerous company examples that owe their success to Fuzzy leaders. I also recommend that you follow Hartley on Twitter at @ScotteHartley for his excellent thought leadership and shared wisdom.

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The Importance of Liberal Arts In The AI Economy - HuffPost