From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
The Internet is subsuming most of our other intellectual technologies, it's becoming our typewriter and our printing press, our map and our clock, our calculator and our telephone, our post office and our library, our radio and our TV.
If you don't have some failures continually, it is a signal that you have retreated into the conservative past.
You have to re-earn your customer's business every single day – it's not just about listening to them, but anticipating what they don't realise they need, and staying ahead of them.
I wasn't thinking about success or being 'big' or creating a huge business. I was thinking about answering a need, a void, creating something that wasn't there before.
We have been able to continue reactively where the pace of change has not outstripped our ability to react to it, but increasingly this is not the case and the pace of global change is pivotally now balanced with our ability to react, and soon will have a greater momentum than that.
To scale? you have the stars aligned- timing is everything. When we created the first personal digital assistant, the Newton... we were probably 15 years too early. Even some of the best computer scientists in the world didn't realise that at the time, we needed Moore's Law to continue doubling processing power every couple of years for at least a decade before it was practical to build products like iPhones.
My initial motivation for studying quantum computing was a desire to understand the fundamental computational limits of the universe. Even in the absence of practical applications, I believed this pursuit was worthwhile as the most rigorous test of quantum mechanics to date. In fact, I often joke that disproving quantum computing sceptics is the primary application of a quantum computer, with everything else being a bonus.
Highly creative individuals tend to habituate more slowly. This slower habituation means that information stays in their minds longer, which can be distracting but also beneficial. The extended presence of information allows different bits of knowledge to collide and interact, leading to new ideas.
The area under the curve over time is greater if you keep your prices low than if you jack them up to maximise revenue. I'd get kicked out of a business school for saying something like that, but it's true.
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.
One of the unique aspects of a prize is that when you put a dollar up in a prize purse, you're incentivising teams around the world to spend many times that dollar in pursuit of the competition. You are leveraging dollars in a completely different way- in a philanthropic pursuit.
What's the business hip hop of this post pandemic world? Who's going to be the Rapper's Delight of the post pandemic world?