From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
A fantastic business stumbles onto something psychological which just gives it a fantastic edge. Netflix's killer psychological hack was 'have 3 DVDs at any one time, watch them as often as you want, change them out as often as you want, £19.95 a month. No late fees ever.' That turned into a business worth billions.
My best ideas, and most successful opportunities have come- usually- from the most unexpected areas.
For instance, while AI can generate images that appear real, it cannot create convincing backgrounds that can be geolocated, since they do not correspond to actual places.
You could take a sword from one game and move it to another. In the events industry, you can imagine having event tickets operating as these collectible, persistent, immutable objects you can carry between markets, with different benefits… potentially even being redeemable against real-world assets.
Because these systems don't see the world the way we do, they can extrapolate things in novel and unexpected ways that we haven't identified. Systems like Deep Mind's AlphaGo are not beating humans at games through speed and brute force, they're discovering new ways to play which we never conceived.
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.
It feels great to have the iPad launched into the world... it's going to be a game changer.
Upon inquiry, I learned that we were using American technology, suitable for American roads but not Indian ones. So, the next step was understanding the market, and we went to the field, spoke to the truckers and understood their requirements and expectations.
To follow your dreams and imagine the unimaginable. Everything man-made that we see and touch on a daily basis has been invented by someone, by an entrepreneur. Life is exciting and you can create your own destiny, just as long as you believe in yourself and step outside of the box.
If we are to migrate our lives to the internet, we need a decentralized infrastructure that enables everyone to have control of their assets without being robbed. This is the same for money, right? Offline money is real money – nobody can take it from you. If you deposit that money with your bank or have a digital wallet with a bank, they can freeze your wallet, they can block transactions.
We've actually gotten rid of all people managers. We don't have a single person whose job it is to manage or tell someone else what to do. Instead we've organized the entire company around work that needs to get done, and then people can have multiple roles across multiple circles, and there's a bunch of other rules and processes.
At the level of individuals, teams, or even firms, knowledge grows and then saturates. It has a finite 'carrying capacity.' What is interesting is that while these individual units are finite, society at large looks infinite because of changes in the teams—the incumbents—that perform best.