From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Industry expertise can sometimes be a hindrance in innovation. Those deeply entrenched in an industry are often the least likely to disrupt it.
We've found that innovation really happens when you constrain a problem very specifically and then throw it out to the world to solve. It's a slightly different way of thinking.
Invention has to be about the dream, there's an ingredient which you can't put in a business plan- it's intangible- but I saw it, it was there.
BitTorrent is the first time in history that people found a way to make decentralised infrastructure work better and more efficiently than centralised. Transferring files through BitTorrent is 100-1000% faster than centralised infrastructure.
Entrepreneurship is a way of life. For me, entrepreneurship has always been about being a builder. Whether it's about undiscovered artists or working with companies pre-launch, the build process is what attracts me.
There will be no cure for cancer until real doctors with real patients in real hospitals can attempt an innovation.
Never was wealth the driver for me. – it was always hey, there's a cool idea here, let's make something of it. It was nice to be well rewarded, but the interesting part was working the problem, thinking about new things and how to bring them forward from being ideas to being products or new ways of doing things.
We're pro-tech, but we need technology that works for us and intersects with our interests. Today, we have technology which is specifically designed to hack and invade our attention – and it doesn't need to be that way.
For instance, while AI can generate images that appear real, it cannot create convincing backgrounds that can be geolocated, since they do not correspond to actual places.
The design and collaborative power of an individual engineer or technologist is more powerful than it's ever been. The tasks themselves are getting more accessible too. Putting a robotic spacecraft out into space is becoming fairly routine.
In some ways, emulating birds would have held us back – yes it would have given us the drive and motivation, but we had to forget about flapping to develop the combustion engine driven plane!
It is the difference between an investor asking, 'so, what's your product…' and 'so, what's your idea, and what steps can we take to turn that into a product.'