Business

In 2010, Alibaba started talking about itself as an ecosystem and it invited many of the world's top biologists to come and lecture on how plants, water and animals all interact – and how that could teach a business about how to interact with its' own marketplace.

Alibaba convinced me that it's possible to do good for society, and to do good in business. Traditionally, people thought of social impact as a nice to have, something on the side as part of your 'CSR.' Increasingly, there is a belief that it should be core to a business.

Tai Chi is the physical manifestation of the Taoist philosophy. It represents the union of yin and yang. It allows one to embrace the seeming contradictions in the world, and in business. How do you become a profitable business while also doing good for society? How do you embrace ambiguity while also using scientific thinking?

Alibaba's vision statement includes a mention of how long it wants to last, and that is specifically 102 years. 100 years sounds like a cliché, it doesn't sound special or memorable… 102 years sticks in your mind, and the reason for this specific figure is that Jack Ma wanted Alibaba to be the only internet company that spanned three centuries.

The best analogy I can give for an IPO is that it's like a wedding. There's a whole lot of attention directed toward the wedding, and less toward the 20 years of marriage after the wedding. IPO has the word initial in it, it's the starting line for being a public company.

NFL Wide Receiver for Tampa Bay Buccaneers & Super Bowl Champion

Every business makes money as a secondary purpose. It's the coincidental result of creating customer value and changing the world in some way that people are willing to pay for and find valuable. That is the primary activity of a business – and you happen to get paid for it.

NFL Wide Receiver for Tampa Bay Buccaneers & Super Bowl Champion

The only real competitive advantage that's durable is cost and innovation – as long as innovation happens along the trajectory that takes into account stakeholders, not just shareholders. Your customers, employees, shareholders, and communities in which you operate are all stakeholders. If you innovate, you need to think about all these groups – and then, guess what, the shareholders will benefit.

NFL Wide Receiver for Tampa Bay Buccaneers & Super Bowl Champion

Until now, we had an insolvency problem – but we didn't have a liquidity problem that could trigger that insolvency because interest rates were so low. Now they're rising, and the mother of all debt crises is going to occur.

Economist known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis.

We are facing the mother of all debt crises. When you look at the data on private and public debt, the debt to GDP ratio was near 200% of global GDP in 1999, today it's more like 350% and rising. In advanced economies, it's over 420% and in China, 330% and rising.

Economist known for predicting the 2008 financial crisis.

This is an ultra-competitive category, and that means that there's real value being created. If nobody shows up to the party, it's probably not a great party. When it comes to staying competitive, I've always focused on the customer and worked backwards from there.

Entrepreneurial businesses innovate, change, evolve and meet customer needs… it's about creating things that people value and love.

I've worked in a lot of different types of business in my career, and you can certainly get tied in knots when you want to create a great 'thing' but can't figure the business model to make it work. My approach was simple- if I didn't make those businesses profitable, I couldn't' innovate. Nobody will fund innovation in perpetuity – you need to make money; you need to deliver value to your customers. When people ask me whether we want growth or profit, I say yes! Both!

Entrepreneurship is not for everybody, and it's also worth noting that you're not entitled to be a great entrepreneur. You're not entitled to be successful if you start a company, in fact the most likely outcome is that you won't be. Sometimes I meet founders and entrepreneurs who complain about how hard their fundraising or engineering challenges are… Guess what… yes…. It's really f***ing hard. That's the truth.

I spent 20 years in executive search, and I was hired by my clients to call 'the most successful people' in the world. Bold face names in bold face organisations. It was my job to recruit them away on behalf of my clients- it would sound difficult right? I would call super successful people and try to get them to do something different. However it wasn't that hard, because despite all the success, which is why I was calling them, they were not very happy which is why they were calling me back.

We can prove, with over 150 companies we've invested in – that you can simultaneously create value for the investor, and society. The reality is this- you can create value economically and socially in parallel – there isn't a contradiction.

Founder of Lotus Development Corporation & Digital Pioneer

I hope that the totality of what I've done, or that which Freada and I have done together, really gives people a sense of hope and possibility, in a practical way, that business can be a constructive force in the world and genuinely help make the world a better place for everyone.

Founder of Lotus Development Corporation & Digital Pioneer