From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I think that we must move to a model where we value nature differently and work by integrating with nature. And that's one of the things I'm very, very excited about—leveraging synthetic biology. Because if we can create excitement, wonder, and solutions to problems like loss of biodiversity, then I think that not only can we inspire the next generation, but we can give them hope.
The third and deepest reason this matters—why it's not just commercially meaningful but potentially world-changing—is the ability to bridge different levels of abstraction.
With Foursquare, our original app was a good idea but it wasn't a hundred million users good idea. The data behind the app, and what we do with the data? That's our good idea. That's our hundred million dollars in revenue idea.
We adopted in Portugal a National Strategy for Entrepreneurship: Startup Portugal. A strategy that aims to make Portugal the ideal space to create, test, fail and try again.
Bureaucracy may be humankind's most important innovation. Whether it's scientific innovation, the invention of the steam engine, locomotive, electric-motor, semi-conductor or antibiotics, none of these would have been possible without the understanding of how to work precisely and repeatably at scale; bureaucracy.
Innovation is a skill, a teachable skill, just like management. If you focus on a handful of key principles, you can effectively drive innovation in any type of business. Innovative companies are not afraid of failure – they're willing to take risks, fail forward, learn from missteps, pivot, and keep going.
We advocate for a 'feminist moonshot' approach, symbolized by the dandelion. Its seeds, spread by children, represent the spreading of our positive narrative towards a cleaner, healthier, more equitable world on the brink of a clean energy revolution.
We are now at the same crossroads, with impact. There is an interesting parallel here with 1933, when we introduced the GAAP. Until then, there had been no real transparency on profit! After the Great Wall Street Crash of 1929, investors sat-up and said 'hey, this is crazy!' and they got transparency through the adoption of GAAP.
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.
I'd never even heard the word 'entrepreneur' growing up – I didn't know what that meant. If I go back to my grandfather – he was the real entrepreneur. He developed things… he made spiked running shoes when he was only 15 (in 1895!).
We define the credit risk of a bond portfolio as the volatility of the CDS basket which would perfectly hedge the sovereign risk of the portfolio.
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.