The shift to impact is like the technological revolution- in fact, it is built on technology. Shifting to impact also doesn't necessarily mean you cannot achieve even greater profits. In todays' world, given consumer, talent and investor preferences – it's actually better to go to risk-return-impact if you want to maximise profits.

You can never convince a chimpanzee to give you a banana by promising him that after he dies, he will go to chimpanzee Heaven, and there receive countless bananas for his good deeds. No chimpanzee will ever believe that. Only humans believe such stories. This is why we rule the world, whereas the chimpanzees are locked up in zoos and research laboratories.

Understanding sales cuts to the core of basically why people say yes, why people give you rejections, and what has to line up in someone's mind before they say yes. It doesn't matter what you're selling, it could be offline or online, tangible or intangible, expensive or inexpensive. It doesn't matter what it is.

Quantum mechanics is a whole new way of thinking– it says that the world is all by itself as a wave function of the universe, but you can never observe that. You can never observe a wave function directly. There is a complex relationship between what the world is and what you see when you look at it, and that relationship involves the idea that you can never predict precisely what you will see, but you can simply say the probability of what you will see.

What makes SETI different today is that instead of the verb "to believe" we're trying to use the verb "to explore". We want to see what's actually out there instead of just believing what someone tells us is out there.

Too often I feel there is also a search for 'the next' Steve Jobs or Joanna Shields. These are extraordinary people and yet I believe we should not treat entrepreneurialism as requiring a narrow checklist of certain characteristics. The key both in the US and the UK is to have hand-raisers – people who want to take a chance, and get involved.

If you look for the next Steve Jobs or Richard Branson in developing economies, however, their businesses rarely make it out of the garage as they are missing three critical factors. They lack financial capital, qualified employees plus the knowledge and access to financial markets.

The way you eliminate fear is to approach your situation from every angle, almost as though it were a logic puzzle. It's also setting a goal but not being afraid to back away if you think that you're going to do irreversible damage on the way there.

Running a business is a challenging job, but until relatively recently, that job was simplified to the extent that you had one target – make as much money as you can for the shareholders. Now, you have to balance a multitude of targets which makes it much more challenging.

Nothing happens by accident, everything is connected, and there are no coincidences: that is the essence of conspiratorial thinking.

Incumbents are not doomed, and disruptors are not ordained. When we started our research, we thought that all these new Silicon Valley businesses were going to come in and destroy the incumbents. What we actually found was that a number of incumbents were doing things that really allowed them to respond and be ready for change.

The scope of entrepreneurial fulfilment, the scope of new entrants changing the world is broader than ever before, and that's great for society. That's great for everyone.