Innovation

We have to get out of this 'tax to spend' mentality and think about using resources to create investment funds that support local businesses, while also expecting to get something back as those businesses appreciate. Those are very different mentalities.

Director of MIT Media Lab; expert in network science and complexity

I think both examples share one glaring mistake. They overlook the fact that even though knowledge diffuses, it is also agglomerative—it tends to concentrate. When it comes to the growth of knowledge, you need to double down on the capacities you already have; you want to build on cities that possess a foundation.

Director of MIT Media Lab; expert in network science and complexity

Our vision is something we call 'SETI of the mind.' The goal is to treat the DMT space and other altered states as novel domains to be explored, much in the same way we treat outer space. It is a completely new frontier inhabited by beings that we treat as potential intelligences with whom we can establish a two-way relationship.

There's a compelling mission—both because of the enormous economic opportunity it represents, if it succeeds, and because of the broader impact it can have on the world. The mission is defined by a stubborn technical challenge. It has to be hard. No one wants to work on something that isn't difficult, and in a sense, choosing the hardest problems becomes a moat.

Everyone on the team strongly believes in the mission. This is the one thing we want to work on in our lives, and multiple people share that same sentiment. We've fallen in love with a very stubborn technical challenge. Convincing others is always hard—it requires conviction on both sides. What we've demonstrated is small-team speed: speed in hiring, speed in getting strong results, and speed in refining our intellectual understanding.

A model that's really strong at mathematical reasoning is likely to be strong at coding. And a model that's excellent at both math and code is often very good at analysing the nuts and bolts of legal reasoning as well. The third and deepest reason this matters is the ability to bridge different levels of abstraction. All of these domains involve multiple layers of abstraction, and the ability to move fluidly between those layers is likely to be extremely commercially valuable.

At Colossal, we are not going to work in humans or non-human primates because we felt like we're already going to have an uphill battle with transparency and education, and we don't want people to be like, if a hair-loss treatment comes out of Colossal, 'are they selling a gene from a woolly mammoth?'

I think that we must move to a model where we value nature differently and work by integrating with nature. And that's one of the things I'm very, very excited about—leveraging synthetic biology. Because if we can create excitement, wonder, and solutions to problems like loss of biodiversity, then I think that not only can we inspire the next generation, but we can give them hope.

My entry into this space came in 2019 when I read a paper by Demis Hassabis of DeepMind advocating for machine learning and AI researchers to go back to their roots in neuroscience. I took that literally — I went back to the neuroscience department at my alma mater, the University of Melbourne, and asked what was exciting them.

Our philosophy has been about trying to control the entire customer experience. A lot of people, when they think about branding, they think about advertising and marketing. But we actually don't do any advertising or marketing. Instead, we invest all of that money into the customer experience, and then our customers do our marketing for us through word of mouth.

CEO of Zappos & Pioneer of Company Culture & Happiness

We've actually gotten rid of all people managers. We don't have a single person whose job it is to manage or tell someone else what to do. Instead we've organized the entire company around work that needs to get done, and then people can have multiple roles across multiple circles, and there's a bunch of other rules and processes.

CEO of Zappos & Pioneer of Company Culture & Happiness

If you don't have some failures continually, it is a signal that you have retreated into the conservative past.

Co-Founder of Pixar & Pioneer in Computer Graphics

People should adopt a fearlessness where they are trying new things, but then accept that by doing this- a certain percentage of things will fail. Failure is not a necessary evil, but rather- it is a positive part of on-going progress.

Co-Founder of Pixar & Pioneer in Computer Graphics

To me it was a great revelation to find creativity in the midst of something that was not thought of as being creative.

Co-Founder of Pixar & Pioneer in Computer Graphics

What I realised was, that in studying other manufacturing companies, in particular Toyota, I could see that their mechanism for distributing responsibility and pushing it far down the organisation turned them into a creative enterprise! This is the opposite of what most people think, which is that the purpose of manufacturing is to reliably produce the same thing over and over again.

Co-Founder of Pixar & Pioneer in Computer Graphics

I think of creativity very broadly, for me it's about solving problems. A lot of people put creativity into the narrow bucket of artistic expression; including film-making, creative writing, music and so on- but there are many who understand that if you look at science and engineering, there are many very interesting problems that require creativity and you see a great outpouring of new ideas.

Co-Founder of Pixar & Pioneer in Computer Graphics