From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Right now, is the absolute best time in human history to be a disruptor. The world is awash with cash chasing disruptive ideas and most companies have one (if not both) hands tied behind their back.
Great founders such as Brian Chesky of Airbnb, Drew Houston of Dropbox, or Adi Tatarko of Houzz, are all on a mission to build a product or service that corrects something that they believe the world got wrong. They are on a mission to correct a personal problem or personal pain.
Having grown up and worked in this environment, I strongly believe there is a solution to everything as long as you are not willing to accept a status quo and constantly look for better results.
It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world...it's going to be a game changer.
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.
You cannot govern a 21st century globalised business with the management style of an 18th century trading firm. In the same way, the modes (and rationale) of governance must be brought up-to-speed with the nature of the citizens they are responsible for.
One of the greatest learnings in my life has been the fact that the sky is really not the limit, after all, there are footprints on the moon. The future of our species will see us travel further, and achieve more, than we could ever predict- so we have to keep our minds open to all possibilities.
I'm just a person who loves to do things before others. I try to do things before they become huge – I feel the market, the world, and try to be more-close to the world today. That's what I think it takes to be an entrepreneur.
I would love to say that we knew all the answers in advance, but the truth is that we discovered our product and opportunity, rather than planning for it.
We are seeing the emergence, development and evolution of entire monetary systems live, unfolding before our eyes. You have Bitcoin and Ethereum and can imagine them as international monetary systems that bring-together local ecosystems. We used to have gold as a key reserve asset, and now it's the US dollar.
AI has been an area of technology for many decades, but the advances of the past five-years show us why this is one of the major technology events of the last several centuries. We haven't really had a technology like AI in the history of technological development – the closest analogy would be the movable type printing press, which came to the fore at the beginning of the enlightenment, some five hundred years ago.
Bubbles are driven by people piling into ideas now, that they think will make them lots and lots of money in the future. The more people that pile in, the more quickly innovation can spread... But if the capital is misallocated? then when the money meets common sense, you get a bust.