From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
You cannot expend more energy than you can consume. That's a fundamental law of physics. If you do, you starve, you die, and you remove yourself from the gene pool. Biological systems have therefore been under enormous selective pressure to develop highly efficient intelligence.
You should try and copy everything you possibly can! It's just that if you run out of alternatives, if you run out of options to copy, you will realise that your entire life has conditioned you to not only be a great copier, but to hesitate when copying is no longer an option.
I realised that games are a potent medium for crafting artificial experiences, offering an unparalleled avenue for exploration and learning. This realisation cemented my ambition to create games, driven by the belief in their profound capacity to encapsulate and convey experiences.
Necessity is the mother of invention, and so a lot of the time – you'll find that when your back is against the wall, that's when you'll come up with your best ideas. Right now, during this pandemic, some of the world's greatest businesses will be invented.
I acknowledge the monumental impact of the convergence of games with computers, leading to the creation of video games. This fusion marked a significant cultural explosion, underscoring the importance of games in the context of modern technology.
There's an entirely different category of knowledge, the utility of which isn't immediately apparent. This category is equally, if not more, crucial, especially for those aspiring to make creative or innovative strides.
For the entrepreneurial spirit to manifest as successful business and social endeavours, we need a nurturing environment and an infrastructure that celebrates the human will to solve problems and progress.
In December 2020, we published in the journal nature that we could turn on 3 genes in mice, that are normally only switched on in embryos. By doing this, we could reverse the age of complex tissues in adult mice. We used this system to restore eyesight to blind, old, mice!
I've never gone into a startup thinking, 'oh hey, I'm going to disrupt an industry….' I go in trying to solve a problem, and if you can effectively solve a problem, you might end up disrupting a whole industry.
I guess that's been my biggest quality – to understand what customer's want, 3 or 4 years ahead of time. That's more or less probably my biggest quality as an entrepreneur.
What seemed like trash to this giant software company was akin to Aladdin's treasure for a 12-year-old. I recruited my older sister as my business partner, and we began to gather discarded floppy disks using my youngest sister's pram. As an added bonus, we offered same-day delivery, a feature that we cheekily called 'Amazon Now'.
Too often, organizations become like frogs in boiling water—gradually losing their competitiveness because everyone is afraid to take risks. The short-term pain of taking a risk seems more daunting than the long-term consequences, even though the long-term pain could be the loss of competitive advantage and, ultimately, the entire value of the enterprise.