From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
What Silicon Valley needs right now is some realism. It needs people who are watching-out and identifying what's real and what's myth. There's a lot of genius and brilliance here, but also a lot of salesmanship.
Much jitteriness in this recent crisis has come down to 'flying blind' – where investors and risk managers have been caught somewhat unaware, and do not have the visibility to make decisions with support.
The greatest innovators spend a disproportionate amount of their time figuring out how to engage with the decision makers who need to green-light their work early so they can build confidence. Innovation can feel scary to a business- old and stable is less worrisome.
How many times have we all heard someone say, 'I had a really good business idea, but then I found somebody else had already done it—so I gave up'? I'd say the opposite: fantastic! If someone's done it, is still in business, and it's working, that's proof you're onto a solid idea.
The reality is that most consumers aren't excited by incremental changes. To capture consumers' attention and make the market take notice, you need meaningful innovation—something genuinely new.
Our vision is something we call 'SETI of the mind.' The goal is to treat the DMT space and other altered states as novel domains to be explored, much in the same way we treat outer space.
Let's stay true to Jaguar's philosophy: let's be a copy of nothing, let's lead and not follow, let's be the first. At the time, we were the first brand to fully commit to Formula E.
Fundamentally, we must slow-down the process of change. We should recognise that most change is not progress- and therefore, it is in our interests to slow down without interfering too much with actual solution making.
My favourite question when evaluating a startup idea is, 'Is this from the future?' I'm not interested in your ideas about the future; I want to understand why you are living in it today. Why are you living in a different future right now than other people are?
Super-specialisation at the expense of a breadth of knowledge is a modern-day fallacy. If you're super-specialised in one particular area, at the expense of that breadth, you are quite likely to make errors in other, bigger fields.
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.
One of the unique aspects of a prize, and particularly an X-Prize, is that it doesn't require letters after your name, specific degrees or backgrounds or so on. We simply define what it is we want solved, and award the prize to whomever is able to accomplish that.