Don’t Fall Behind in the AI and Tech Revolution | Exponential Organizations 2.0 | EP #64

In this episode, Peter and Salim discuss the potential of small teams, suggesting that the next billion-dollar company could be a handful of individuals harnessing the power of AI, creating your Massive Transformative Purpose, and the truth about Exponential Organizations. Salim Ismail is a sought-after strategist and a renowned technology entrepreneur who built and sold his company to Google. He’s been featured in the most prominent publications such as NYT, Forbes, Fortune, and Bloomberg and has led lectures at the world’s greatest companies and about the future of Tech. Currently, he’s the founder and chairman of ExO Works and OpenExO. My new book with Salim Ismail, Exponential Organizations 2.0: The New Playbook for 10x Growth and Impact, is now available on Amazon: https://bit.ly/3P3j54J _____________ Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ Get my new Longevity Practices book for free: https://www.diamandis.com/longevity _____________ I send weekly emails with the latest insights and trends on today’s and tomorrow’s exponential technologies. Stay ahead of the curve, and sign up now: Tech Blog _____________ Connect With Peter: Twitter Instagram Youtube Moonshots and Mindsets Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Speaker 00

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• 0:26Speaker 01

  Flowing ad budget on metrics that look great until the CFO sees them. That's bull spend. And marketers are calling it out in dashboard confessions.

• 0:35Speaker 02

  I remember telling my boss, it'll be good for the brand. When leads were slow. Yeah, it wasn't.

• 0:43Speaker 01

  Cut the bull spend. LinkedIn lets you target by company, job title, and more. Advertise on LinkedIn. Spend $250 on your first campaign and get a $250 credit. Go to LinkedIn.com/campaign. Terms and conditions apply.

• 0:56Speaker 03

  The next billion dollar company will be three people leveraging OpenAI and some of the other LLMs out there. Look deep inside yourself. Find the MTP that you want to go after and just go after it. This is the best time in the history of the world to be an entrepreneur.

• 1:19Speaker 03

  Let's talk about what it takes to build an EXO. Right? We have a 12 step program. It had to be 12 step. It had to be 12 step. You want to hark back to kind of things that work. Oh, by the way, just to, as a thing, we have behind us a wonderful rocket. I call this the spinal tap rocket. If you've seen the movie Spinal Tap, they tried to build a huge set and they put the wrong feet versus inches and they ended up with a... So I call this the spinal tap rocket. Because of... By the way, for those who've never seen the movie, if you go into a Tesla and turn the volume knob full up, the volume knob goes to 11. And you can go find out why that's the case. It's kind of amazing. All right, back to how do you build an EXO? All right, so let's go through some of these steps. And Peter, jump in. Yeah, we'll go back and forth on this.

• 2:03Speaker 03

  Step one, and most important, is what is your MTP?

• 2:07Peter Diamandis?

  Hopefully you've heard this over and over again enough that it sunk in.

• 2:11Speaker 03

  People beat this into you, because it's been beaten into us. You have to select what fundamental problem you want to solve. That's step one. And you use the moonshot planner tool that Peter mentioned. Use your own devices. We have an MTP tool ourselves. Ask your friends, when I was younger, what did I say, what I wanted to do? What fundamental problem do you want to solve?

• 2:33Peter Diamandis?

  By the way, once you have your MTP, I want you to challenge yourself. At a cocktail party, to share it out loud. Don't be embarrassed by it, like, you know, "My massive transformative purpose is..." And what the hell is an MTP? Well, you explain it. And by the way, when you go outward facing with your MTP, it brings people to you. You'll be amazed. "Oh, you've got to meet this person over here. I've got a friend you've got to be connected with." It's a magnet to bring partners, community to you.

• 3:00Speaker 03

  You know, when I say at a cocktail party, I want to transform civilization. It doesn't really work, so I think I've got to think about that. Alright, so number one, you've got your MTP. Number two, critical, join or create communities around that MTP. So if your MTP is cure cancer, okay? You can either create community around that, because there's lots of people interested in that, or go to platforms like Meetup or others that have thousands of user groups and existing communities that you can join. Why you want to find like-minded people? You want to share that MTP? You want to build a community or connect with your MTP to the largest group of people possible around you.

• 3:41Speaker 03

  So build and connect, or just join, communities that reflect your values and your MTP.

• 3:48Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, the worst thing you want to do is have a team split, because we have different purposes, right? MTP is like pulling a string. It unifies. It pulls you together.

• 3:59Speaker 03

  That's right.

• 4:00Peter Diamandis?

  So composing a team around that, based on your MTP, is fundamental.

• 4:05Speaker 03

  By the way, in the future, I think we'll be hiring, based on the alignment of an individual's MTP with the company's MTP. Because if there's not alignment on that, there's no point really working together. Other on things, right? So that's going to be a kind of a prediction for the future. All right. Step three is put a team together. And here we recommend four roles. A CEO founder type visionary, a product person, a builder and a business model finance person. Okay. And lots of startup theory has around what what what composition should be. You know, you and I have been talking about the idea from Jeremiah Oh Yang and a few others that

• 4:45Speaker 03

  the next billion dollar company will be three people leveraging OpenAI and some of the other L L Ms out there. Where the CEO takes her vision and marketing. The C, the product guy is is building, using L L Ms to build the product. And the operations guy is making sure all the AI chatbots are operating. And we think that will be the next billion dollar company.

• 5:09Peter Diamandis?

  Step four is your breakthrough idea. And notice here that it's step four and it's not step one. Right. When you got your massive transformative purpose, which is going to last you a decade or two. Now you're going to find out what technologies, what business model is going to be in service of transforming that. Because if you start with a technology, that technology may not last very long. It may be obsoleted at the rate we're going in a year or two. What really keeps this all focused, train on the tracks is in fact that M T P.

• 5:46Speaker 03

  Once you have the basic idea, right? Now you need to kind of start putting flesh to that to that raw idea. So you have a fill out a lean startup business model canvas coming from Alex Osterwalder. Or the E X O canvas, which was developed by our community. You can find it at E X O canvas dot com. If you fill those two out, basically it's talks you through how to think about partners, channels, customers, vendors, value proposition, et cetera, et cetera. So you've fully thought through the idea before you start building anything. Please don't build anything until you've filled out these canvases to get a rough sense because it'll tease out any mistakes you make. And you want to go as long as possible without building things. I remember when I was building Angstro, which we did.

• 6:30Speaker 03

  My co-founder Rohit instantly wanted to go talk to a hundred people about it. I'm like, wait, no, you'll give away the idea. He's like, no, no, I want free feedback on the idea from a hundred people. I get free.

• 6:40Peter Diamandis?

  Can I stress that?

• 6:43Peter Diamandis?

  An idea is the easy part. I remember a conversation with Elon who said, "When you look at the relative value of the idea to implementation, the value of the idea rounds to zero." It's all about implementation, manufacturability, and implementation. Again, I made the same mistake early on, just not wanting, keeping the idea close. But you lose. It's a lose, lose, lose when you don't share the idea. Because you don't find out all the ways it's failed, all the people that can help you. Believe me, if you're the right person to make it happen, you're driven by the MTP, the idea is just the very first incremental step.

• 7:26Speaker 03

  Right. So now you have your idea and you've built your business model canvas and EXO canvas, etc. The next step is to find a business model.

• 7:34Peter Diamandis?

  My favorite part...

• 7:35Speaker 03

  Is finding the business model.

• 7:37Peter Diamandis?

  I am the most excited, I'm more excited about business model innovation than I am around the technologies.

• 7:44Speaker 03

  I hate the business model part.

• 7:46Peter Diamandis?

  Really?

• 7:46Speaker 03

  Yeah, I struggle with this a huge amount. We've been struggling for years in EXO to find, testing different business models, etc., etc. And I'm just like, "God damn, can't we just go solve all the problems?"

• 7:57Peter Diamandis?

  We should talk about it.

• 7:58Speaker 03

  We'll talk more. Maybe I could use some advice from that. Let me talk through the business model side, right? Because there's a really big inflection point that's happened around building a business and finding a business model. Chris Anderson, who's the editor of Wired Magazine and created the DIY Drones community, and he invented the long tail idea, etc. Wrote this book a few years ago called Free, arguing that as we make information more widely available, every business model goes to free. And then you have a bunch of layers on top of that free information.

• 8:27Peter Diamandis?

  It's the demonetization.

• 8:28Speaker 03

  It's demonetization, and you have an advertising business model, or a subscription model, or something. Let's use the example of music. We used to have eight major music studios selling scarcity, selling you the physical cassette, the CD, the DVD, selling scarcity as their business model. Then we digitized music, right? All of those eight pretty much disappear, and now you have two platforms, iTunes and Spotify, selling you abundance on a subscription model, right? So that we saw in the music industry, we've seen the same thing in books and in news. We'll see the same thing in transportation and healthcare and education, it's going to happen. So he basically argued that most business models will go to free. And it was a very seminal book around at the time.

• 9:11Speaker 03

  Kevin Kelly, who we talked about already, wrote a response to this saying better than free would be one of the business models around this. And he wrote a blog post called Better Than Free. Everything that Kevin Kelly writes is amazing, but please go read this blog post. It's seminal if you want to build an EXO. What he does, he identifies if the base information is basically widely available, like digital health information or so on, there's about one of eight ways in which to add value to that. So if you look at this list, Airbnb is giving you accessibility. Uber is giving you findability. Facebook is giving you personalization. Financial markets often sell immediacy, etc. And if you have an information-based industry, you're using one or more of these.

• 9:56Speaker 03

  And we think what Kevin's identified here are the business models of a digital world. And we think more and more 21st century business models will focus on this aspect of this. So critical to go check this out. Just on a slight segue, Kevin talks also about, they wrote a book called What Technology Wants.

• 10:14Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 10:14Speaker 03

  Right? Basically saying that the pace of technology is inexorable now, past our human ability to limit it, which is an AI conversation that we could have at some other point. But anyway.

• 10:25Peter Diamandis?

  Technology wants to be free.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  Technology wants to be free and it wants to be, it wants to be abundant, even though human nature is like keep everything scarce and try and limit things. Alright, so now you have a business model, you've got some sense of what it looks like. Let's go to the next few steps of building an EXO, okay? Once you have the business model, the next step is to build the MVP. And this is again coming from lean startup thinking. And it's really, really critical. What's the smallest feature footprint of a product to give you, to get it out there and launch and test with customers?

• 10:59Peter Diamandis?

  Hopefully this is second nature and it's obvious to you, but building an MVP. Again, this is about building a data-driven company, right? We think we know what the customers want, but we don't actually.

• 11:12Speaker 03

  As Steve Blank said, no business plan survives contact with the first customer. Right? Because you think you have a sense, but when you get out there. I remember Reid Hoffman saying it a different way. If you're not embarrassed by your product when you launch it, you've waited too long.

• 11:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 11:26Speaker 03

  Why? Because if you wait till it's perfect, you're going to get it wrong. And you're going to, you're going to make assumptions that you haven't validated. So the minimum, I remember when I was running Brickhouse, Yahoo's incubator. We had Katerina Fake, the founder of Flickr, come in and talk to the engineers. And she said, talk to a team, and they go, she goes, what's so great about your product? And they go, we have 20 features in this product. It's going to be beautiful, etc. And she said, all right, build the two that you think are going to identify the two features out of the 20 that you think are going to make it work and make it succeed. Launch those two and then get a feedback loop going.

• 12:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 12:03Speaker 03

  Right?

• 12:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, Ash Patel talks about very similar. He says, you know, when you look at all the things you have to do in a company, instead of ordering them the way of a priority that you might have, reprioritize them in order of which ones are going to teach you the most and do those first. Right? It's constant learning in this regard.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  Constant testing.

• 12:23Peter Diamandis?

  And the eighth step here is validate marketing and sales. Again, this is part of your MVP. How are you going to market it? How are you going to sell it? How are you going to price it? Are you marketing it direct? Are you going through channels, through partnerships? All of this is fundamental to get to scale.

• 12:42Speaker 03

  And validating marketing sales and managing your funnel, right? How many people do you have interested in the product? How many have signed up for the free thing? How many people might sign up for a paid model? What's your churn, etc., etc.? And so there's a whole now very well-understood scientific, very clear metric process on how to manage your funnel. Okay? Like if you have, if you're in enterprise sales, which takes like nine months to do an enterprise sale, then you better have a big funnel and figure out you get a lot of stuff in the front, because only a few are going to drop at the bottom. Keep you viable, right? So getting your funnel right and managing the sales funnel is absolutely critical in this piece of this. So now you have, at this point, you should have what's called product market fit.

• 13:26Speaker 03

  Which is, you have a product that people are paying for and with feedback from customers that they're excited about your product. If you don't have both those things, you don't have product market fit, go back to MVP or go back another step. Or figure out another breakthrough idea.

• 13:43Peter Diamandis?

  Everyone listening is probably saying that's great if you're a startup, but what if you're running a company that's got 50,000 employees and you've got, you know, how, are you still building an MVP?

• 13:53Speaker 03

  You're still building an MVP, because the only way you know that something's going to work today is by getting it out there and iterating. Okay? And big companies are very, very bad at this, because they're trying to get it perfect before you launch it. People want to wait till it's perfect, etc. It never happens this way. Look at the biggest companies in the world and they've all been iterating very, very well. Amazon is famous for constantly iterating. They had no idea whether Amazon Prime would work, right? You've got a bit of experience. Tell the Amazon Prime story. It's so fascinating to see the mentality and psychology there.

• 14:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, Jeff Holden, who was the VP of Product both at, Chief Product Officer both at Amazon and Uber, was on my board at XPRIZE, tells the story, you know, when Amazon Prime was first proposed as an experiment, it was considered a foolish idea, you know, Bezos basically said, "Try it." And now it's, you know, what percentage of Amazons?

• 14:49Speaker 03

  Amazon Prime is a, like, I think it's 20, no, it's 25%. The killer one is Amazon Web Services, right? And this is now, again, and again, another example. By the way, I want to give a shout out to an Amazon policy that I completely love. If you have a big company, I dare you, go home and go to the office tomorrow and implement this policy. They realized that in any company, it's really easy to say no to an idea. One of 20 people can say no, kills the idea. Whereas if you're an, if you're a startup, you can go to 20 investors, one says yes, you're off to the races. So how do you deal with? That impedance mismatch in a big company. So they came up with a policy and it's called the Amazon institutional yes.

• 15:31Speaker 03

  So if you're inside Amazon and you come to me with an idea and I'm your manager, I'm not allowed to say no to your idea. My default answer has to be yes. And if I need to say? If I want to say no, I have to write a two-page thesis as to why it's a bad idea and post it publicly on the internet. Right, so they've created friction and embarrassment to saying no. It's way easier for me to go, ah, just go do your idea. I'm sure you're going to fail at the next level, etc. And now the product gets tested and at least now you have real data. One of the results of this policy was actually Amazon Web Services. Nothing to do with their core strategy, not on any roadmap. Nobody could figure out how to say no to it. And that's one of the most successful products of all time. It delivers 75% of Amazon's profits globally.

• 16:16Speaker 03

  It's just unbelievable.

• 16:18Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, Peter Diamandis here. I've been asked over and over again, what do I do for my own health? Well, I put it down in this book called Peter's Longevity Practices. It's very readable in just an hour. In the book, I cover longevity diet, exercise, sleep, my annual found upload, meds and supplements, longevity mindset. It's literally consumable in just an hour's time. Hopefully to incentivize you to make a difference in your life, to intercept the technologies coming our way. If you want this, it's free. Just check out the link below and download it right now. Another example is Kickstarter, right? Hopefully you've all heard of Kickstarter, played with Kickstarter. You know, it was thought of as a platform for young companies to try their product out, get commitments early on.

• 17:03Peter Diamandis?

  What we're seeing is large corporations actually trying things on Kickstarter as well to get early information about who wants what color, who wants what different product elements.

• 17:12Speaker 03

  My fellow Waterloo grad, Eric Majakovsky.

• 17:15Peter Diamandis?

  Majakovsky, right, Pebble Watch.

• 17:16Speaker 03

  Pebble Watch. He went to, this is a great little story. He came out of Y Combinator, right? Best incubator in the world with the best network in the world. Trying to raise a hundred thousand dollars to build a prototype of his running watch. All the investors said no because Silicon Valley is very biased against hardware at the time. So now he's got three weeks of cash left, right? He's like about to run out of money. So he puts up a project on Kickstarter desperately saying, can I raise a hundred thousand dollars? Can I pre-sell my watch? Raises ten million dollars on Kickstarter, right? Now that tells you two or three really interesting things. One, all the investors are wrong, which is fine. This is why investors use a portfolio approach. More importantly, if you have crowdfunding, why do you need the investor?

• 18:01Speaker 03

  And now the sophisticated investment ecosystem around Silicon Valley is rendered irrelevant in a sense because I can crowdfund something. But third, and maybe most importantly to the point you're making, for the first time in business history, you can validate demand for a product without building the product.

• 18:18Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 18:18Speaker 03

  Right? Throughout history, you had to like build a product and go, do you like it or not? Customer goes, I hate it.

• 18:23Peter Diamandis?

  And now Eric has a new problem. He's got to build a lot more watches. He's off to China on the next flight.

• 18:29Speaker 03

  That's the, that's the, but that's a great problem to have. I've got ten million dollars in the bank now, I've got to go do this. So, by the way, Sony Corporation is now launching anonymous Kickstarter campaigns and then funding the successful ones because it's just an easier way to validate success. So really critical.

• 18:45Peter Diamandis?

  Data-driven decision-making, it's not listening to the experts who tell you what they think.

• 18:50Speaker 03

  Yeah, so constantly run experiments, validate your marketing sales, okay? Step nine, once you've got a funnel out there and so on, is to now implement the EXO attributes of scale and ideas. Do as much staff on demand, community and crowd, implement algorithms, leverage assets, figure out engagement models for your product and then all the internal mechanisms. What's the, how are you going to, what interfaces do, where do you want to automate? The interfaces between you and the customer. What dashboards are you running? How are you doing experimentation and what experiments are you running, right? How do you decentralize decision-making and what social technologies are you using inside the company?

• 19:29Peter Diamandis?

  Now to be clear, right? It's not implementing all ten, it's necessary, right? And it's, you might actually begin with a couple of these and then move towards others as part of your plan.

• 19:40Speaker 03

  That used to be the case.

• 19:41Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 19:41Speaker 03

  So in the first book, we, our research indicated if you implemented four of these, then you got, became an EXO. But I think today the market basically says the data now shows that if you're not implementing all of these, somebody else is. Right? And so the more you implement these, the better. The faster you can implement dashboards, for example, the faster you've got a real-time sense of what's happening with the business. The more you can implement experimentation, the more you're implementing a learning organization.

• 20:09Peter Diamandis?

  And a few of these, there's no excuse not to be implementing them. They're just fundamental best practices as an entrepreneur today.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  Yeah. Now, really critically, I'll give you a great example. There's a company in Australia called Smart Group. And what they do is every quarter, they pick, they get 10 people. Each of them picks one of those scale or ideas attributes and they implement that attribute. So they have 10 projects going on on a non-stop basis, implementing scale and ideas. They grew 5X over a two-year period by doing this. They were already a public company, by the way. So this is not a small company. They were already a public company and then they grew 5X by applying the full scale and ideas methodology.

• 20:47Peter Diamandis?

  Our 10th step is to implement and establish a culture. But I would say, you know, a culture begins from the very beginning. And it's, you know, what happens when the CEO is not watching? It's the interactions between your employee base, between your founders. And again, it starts with that MTP. It starts with the original founders and that culture is going to drive everything. Elements of the culture I really personally always want to be driving. It's data-driven, experimentalism, fundamentals there.

• 21:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. Now, we found over the years that having an EXO structure takes out a lot of politics. Right? As we said in the implication, most of the, in most traditional companies, almost all the conversations about what's happening on the inside, that person's product didn't work, did they get budget for that thing? Why is that guy trying to steal my team members? And within the EXO, most of the conversation about what's on the outside. Are we solving the fundamental problem or not, et cetera? So that's critical. And we found that by implementing more and more of the attributes, the culture stays young, alive, a learning organization oriented constantly towards the MTP. Okay? Step 11, constantly retest your assumptions. This relates Back to experimentation.

• 22:07Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 22:07Speaker 03

  But you got to retest, is my pricing correctly? Am I really following my MTP? Because often you can drift off to the side.

• 22:14Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God.

• 22:15Speaker 03

  We all, we.

• 22:16Peter Diamandis?

  I've been there.

• 22:16Speaker 03

  We at EXO almost accidentally became a consulting company. And we spent, we were spending more time advising big companies than trying to solve big problems. We like, the community actually rose up and go, hey, what happened to the impact side of it? And we're like, oh dang, we, we kind of accidentally left that. Because you're in your own soup. It's really hard to gauge and see what is happening around you. So make sure you have active advisors that are constantly calling you out and testing you against the, what you're doing. Are you aligned towards the MTP or not?

• 22:45Peter Diamandis?

  Bert Rutan, who is the famed aerospace designer, engineer at Scaled Composites. He built Spaceship One that won our $10 million X Prize. Has a quote I love. He says, "Question, don't defend."

• 22:59Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 22:59Peter Diamandis?

  If you're building, it's a part of a cultural attribute. If you build a culture which asks, you know, which allows questions to be asked at any time. So defending yourself, as soon as you start defending your position, you're backed into a corner. And you're not able to explore new areas. You're not telling yourself the truth. You're simply defending yourself. So question, don't defend is one of those cultural elements of asking questions.

• 23:23Speaker 03

  You know, the video of Bert talking about this is so amazing. He goes, "I've never been so goddamn excited as when trying to win this, win this prize." I want to just do a quick shout out here.

• 23:33Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 23:33Speaker 03

  It's so amazing to watch an X Prize unfold. And the rationale behind this is when you put up a $10 million prize, something like 30 or 40 teams will spend like up to $150 million in R and D trying to win the $10 million. So it's the most leveraged model for innovation ever. Where you can crowdsource hundreds of teams. How many teams are registered for the carbon extraction prize?

• 23:56Peter Diamandis?

  We had 1,200 teams going after Elon's $100 million. We just launched this wildfire X Prize. And after the first month, we have something like 60 or 70 teams, all designing different ways. You know, detecting the fire is not the hard part, but how, if you found a wildfire. Fire igniting that's moving and you had to put it out autonomously in 10 minutes. Without humans in the loop, how would you do it? Right? And so it's fun and it's exciting and it's changing the business model, right? The business model, again, I love business models. The business model for insurance was always, you know, fire insurance will pay you after your house burns down. What about flipping the model and saying,

• 24:39Peter Diamandis?

  our fire insurance prevents the fire in the first place, right? That's.

• 24:44Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's right. I want to just do an anecdote related to the MTP. One of my favorite stories at X Prize, and you watch all these teams like running around like mortgaging their house hoping to win.

• 24:56Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God, yes.

• 24:56Speaker 03

  Right? My favorite story is the oil cleanup X Prize funded by Wendy Schmidt, the $3 million prize for anybody that could double after the Deepwater Horizon oil spill. It turns out the oil cleanup technology has not changed since the 1980s, since the Exxon Valdez, because there's no economic incentive. So very quickly, a prize gets put together to say, can you double the effectiveness of existing oil technologies?

• 25:19Peter Diamandis?

  Can I?

• 25:19Speaker 03

  Can you tell us?

• 25:20Peter Diamandis?

  We had 340 teams around the world who registered to compete for this, to try and reinvent how you clean up oil spill on the surface before it hits the beaches and the fisheries. And we had amazing teams, the top 10 teams. One team was a family out of Alaska that mortgaged their home literally and built technology that came in the top 10. Another team, you can't make this stuff up, was a tattoo artist and his client, the two artists had a, the two artists had a vision and an idea. His client was a dentist, literally underwrote it. They built a scale model, the guys tested in the guy's jacuzzi.

• 26:01Peter Diamandis?

  And the first time it saw full-scale oil spill was at our test facility. And they came in second. I mean, and it's like.

• 26:09Speaker 03

  What's great about that story, right? Is if you're a VC or an investor and that team walks into your office, you are never funding that team, right? Like you're a dentist, you're a tattoo, you have no experience, no background, no expertise in this. What do you, never are you funding that team and yet you would have lost out, right? And this is what's so. Magical about sourcing from the crowd. You never know what you're going to get. But if you have an abundance of people working on it, that problem is always going to be solved. And this is so critical.

• 26:35Peter Diamandis?

  And by the way, check it out at Xprize.org. Please get involved. Salim is on our board. Anusha Ansari, who funded our first $10 million prize, and then flew privately to the space station for 10 days, is now the CEO. I serve as executive chairman there. We've launched $300 million in Xprizes. We're about to launch another quarter billion dollars. Our mission is to crowdsource solutions to the world's biggest problems. Not for ideas, but people actually go and build this stuff and demonstrate it.

• 27:05Speaker 03

  All right, final step in building an EXO, right? Is try and turn yourself into a platform, okay? If you look at the history of the internet, Yahoo, BlackBerry, Nokia, all failed to become platforms. Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon, all successfully became platforms, which means you become like a coral reef and you feed an ecosystem of people that are making their living off you. And now you're wired into the infrastructure.

• 27:30Peter Diamandis?

  How incentivized am I to support your platform when it's the means by which I earn my revenue?

• 27:37Speaker 03

  Yeah, the average YouTube professional today is making like $4,000 a month.

• 27:42Peter Diamandis?

  It's crazy.

• 27:43Speaker 03

  It's like an unbelievable amount of kind of value that's being generated, created. A Mr. Beast, who's probably the most popular YouTube YouTuber out there, found out something amazing about his background. He studied YouTube videos for three years before he created his first video, because he wanted to understand the dynamics so fundamentally.

• 28:05Peter Diamandis?

  Understand the algorithms that drove the economics behind it. And it's all about algorithms. Hey everybody, this is Peter. A quick break from the episode. I'm a firm believer that science and technology and how entrepreneurs can change the world. Is the only real news out there worth consuming? I don't watch the crisis news network. I call CNN or Fox and hear every devastating piece of news on the planet. I spend my time training my neural net, the way I see the world, by looking at the incredible breakthroughs in science and technology, how entrepreneurs are solving the world's grand challenges, what the breakthroughs are in longevity, how exponential technologies are transforming our world. So twice a week, I put out a blog.

• 28:50Peter Diamandis?

  One blog is looking at the future of longevity, age reversal, biotech, increasing your health span. The other blog looks at exponential technologies, AI, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR, VR, blockchain. These technologies are transforming what you as an entrepreneur can do. If this is the kind of news you want to learn about and shape your neural nets with, go to diamandis.com backslash blog and learn more. Now back to the episode. Let's share two EXOs just as to hammer this in. One is a company called Thrasio, who is actually built by a fraternity brother of mine, Carlos Cashman.

• 29:31Peter Diamandis?

  And what Carlos and his partners did was they went on to Amazon, they went on to and found companies that had low revenues, product sellers who had low revenues, but had extraordinary customer reviews. And if you think about it, what is that say? Well, this supplier doesn't have a great marketing engine. And what they ended up doing was they began aggregating these.

• 29:58Speaker 03

  First, they were just advising them. And then somebody said, why don't you just buy the company? And they're like, oh, so they started buying these companies. At one point, they put up a sign at an Amazon Marketplace conference. If you're over a million in revenue, we want to talk to you. And they had a lineup around the block of people wanting to talk to them.

• 30:14Peter Diamandis?

  So they went- Zero to a couple of billion?

• 30:16Speaker 03

  In two years, they went from zero to $2 billion in revenue. Okay, just think about that, zero to two billion dollars in revenue. And because they're using an AI to scour the marketplace, the whole thing is automated. They can literally find a product, reach out to the seller and say, hey, we think we can make you bigger. Do you want to sell? Boom. So this is like a next generation CPG company. People, startups are now saying, I'm the Thrasio of this, I'm the Thrasio of dry cleaning or whatever. It's been unbelievably successful. The highest rated EXO that we ever saw, because we scored them all on that model, is GitHub. Right? GitHub was, is a platform where developers can share code and watch each other and kind of.

• 31:00Speaker 03

  And I can rate your code, you can rate my code. So they've created, and they put in all the elements. Gamefication, algorithms, staff on demand, etc. Now, they were eight and a half years old, and Microsoft bought them for seven and a half billion dollars. Right? I remember talking to the accounting partner that was managing the acquisition for Microsoft. And he was freaking out. He's like, I don't know what to put on the balance sheet. This company has no assets, no intellectual property, and basically no workforce. Like, what are we buying? So he's literally trying to kill the deal because he can't figure out how to put any value against it in the Amazon, in the Microsoft accounting systems. And finally, Satya Nadella says, just buy the damn thing. I want the community.

• 31:40Speaker 03

  And now, with ChatGPT, they have access to all the GitHub repositories because GitHub has been that successful. The most, my favorite thing about GitHub is because it's open source and everybody is fully transparent. Your salary, if you're a software developer in Silicon Valley today, your salary has zero correlation to the university you went to, the degree you got or the grades you got. It's 100%. What is your GitHub rating? And that's how you're, that's how you're paid. Right? So the value of a computer science degree just went to zero. So this is a profound commentary on the future of higher education. As we apply that to doctors and lawyers and so on, ChatGPT will really transform all of this.

• 32:23Speaker 03

  Let's note, by the way, since the year 2000, we have written about three trillion lines of code around the world. And when an LLM or AI has access to all those three trillion lines of code, the next code you write is going to be that much better. Because if I'm a developer, you did software development when you were younger. You write maybe 50,000 lines of code, 100,000 lines of code. Never do you have access instantly in real time to three trillion lines of code. So what's coming in the future is going to be unbelievably.

• 32:51Peter Diamandis?

  It's the same thing in medicine, right? I like to tell people, you know, every day there are 7,000 medical journals that are articles published in medical journals, 7,000. How many has your doctor read this morning? Well, an AI diagnostician will have consumed all of them, right? We're all going to have AI co-pilots, whether you're a doctor, a lawyer, an artist, a physician, whatever it may be.

• 33:14Speaker 03

  I like the way you put it where you go, it's not an AI that's going to take your job. It's a human using AI that's going to take your job, right? And so it goes very quickly.

• 33:21Peter Diamandis?

  Our whole purpose here, mine is to inspire and guide entrepreneurs like you to create a hopeful, compelling and abundant future for humanity. I'm driven by that MTP. It's the reason I do what I do, why I'm here with my dear brother Saleem. And Saleem's to help, you know, create and transform the planet and create exponential organizations.

• 33:40Speaker 03

  And the reason I'm here is because the only constituency and demographic that can change the world is entrepreneurs.

• 33:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, 100%.

• 33:47Speaker 03

  You're risk tolerant and by definition, you're crazy, right? Therefore, you can actually change the world. And we've got now a very clear methodology, the value proposition, support system, tools, training and the ecosystem for you to go do that. So the challenge we have for you is look deep inside yourself. Find the MTP that you want to go after and just go after it. This is the best time in the history of the world to be an entrepreneur.

• 34:13Peter Diamandis?

  The best time ever to be alive, except perhaps for tomorrow. You have a chance to uplift humanity, make a dent in the universe, and we hope that you do.

• 34:26Speaker 05

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