From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The digital world has democratized content – it's now available on every platform all the time – and we're going to see a whole raft of new stars, because talent can be rewarded.
80% of self-made billionaires we studied made their mark in mature, competitive markets. They weren't all 'exactly' new products that came out – they were maybe a variation of a business model or existing product that pleased the customer in a different way. Think of Howard Schulz with Starbucks, or Sara Blakeley with Spanx for example.
Jack Ma went to Jonathan and said, Jonathan, what do you know about finance? He said, 'I don't know anything about finance.' Jack said, 'Well, what do you know about PayPal?' – his response, 'I don't know anything about PayPal'. Jack then said, 'Okay, you're hired, we want you to be the CEO of Ali Pay!'.
There simply isn't enough creativity and bandwidth at the top to deal with the level of complexity and change in today's world. In bureaucratic structures, a small group of leaders can hold the organization's capacity to change hostage to their own personal willingness to adapt.
Web3 and blockchain are as big of a fundamental shift as the internet was in 1999-2000. Crypto and NFTs create open systems with distributed ownership that can be used to build a practically infinite number of applications. We're at day zero of a gigantic wave.
At the level of individuals, teams, or even firms, knowledge grows and then saturates. It has a finite 'carrying capacity.' What is interesting is that while these individual units are finite, society at large looks infinite because of changes in the teams—the incumbents—that perform best.
There simply isn't enough creativity and bandwidth at the top to deal with the level of complexity and change in today's world. A century ago, information was expensive to acquire and move- bureaucracy was a logical way of bringing information together. The world simply doesn't work like that anymore.
The sleep revolution is finally hitting the workplace. The business world is waking up to the high cost of sleep deprivation on productivity, health care, and ultimately the bottom line. I expect the nap room to soon become as universal as the conference room.
In the future, these kinds of blood tests will become commonplace. They will allow us to offer treatments for Alzheimer's disease 10, 20, or even 30 years before symptoms start to manifest, much like how we currently handle cholesterol. This early detection and intervention will be our strategy for combating Alzheimer's.
These are the kinds of digital services that have been technologically available for 25 years but just haven't been implemented anywhere. Basically, for scalability all you need is more servers.
We see math as code and code as math. The real magic, and the key transition, comes from combining AI, programming languages, and mathematics—bringing all three pillars together.
Guess what, it turns out that you can't make big-breakthroughs without crazy optimism and idealism! With the exception of Elon Musk, that attitude is largely missing right now.