Business

When it comes to the growth of knowledge, you need to double down on the capacities you already have; you want to build on cities that possess a foundation. When you build in a remote location, costs skyrocket, attractiveness is hard to engineer, and the complementarities that help knowledge stick to a place simply aren't there.

Physicist & Director of MIT Media Lab Connection Science group

Don't give away a majority shareholding the way I had to with HomeServe. I ended up giving away 52% of the shares with my partner for a £500,000 investment we took when we'd run out of money—a terrible time to raise capital.

You absolutely need some funding to get started. But ideally, that should come from remortgaging your house or borrowing a bit from friends, family, or parents—just enough to have a small amount of money, but not too much. That way, you can copy, pivot, test, learn, and prove out your model on a small scale.

I think people need to understand that building a business is really, really difficult. That shouldn't put anyone off, but there's no easy road to riches.

Any time you're in a situation where the price is 'too low'—and I put that in quotes because it might not feel low to you, sometimes things are very expensive, but there are more people who'd like to buy the thing than they have the ability to serve—that's when a hidden market will crop up.

One of the great ironies of a company like Meta, where I worked, is that well over 90% of its users are outside the US, yet well over 90% of the bandwidth among decision-makers is focused on what's happening in America. In the end, that just doesn't make sense.

Former UK Deputy Prime Minister & Liberal Democrat Leader

If you tried to achieve that purely through informal methods—where hallucination is a persistent risk—getting to the same level of consistent correctness would likely require a lot more research effort and resources.

From day one, we said that we wanted to create value, create impact, and create inspiration. We're not going to build a business that just creates impact—we're not a nonprofit. We have to create value. As long as we're doing all three, we're never going to lose.