The Successful Entrepreneur Formula w/ Salim Ismail | EP #47

In this episode, Peter and Salim take a deep dive into Exponential Organizations and how experimentation can help exponentially build a business. You will learn about: 02:52 | The New School Is Surpassing The Old School. 18:50 | Trial & Error Will Give You The Data Necessary To Grow. 29:09 | The Pillars Of Exponential Experimentation. 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. I'm launching a new book with Salim Ismail called Exponential Organizations 2.0. Our launch event is on June 6th. It's a 3-hour workshop covering practical strategies for achieving exponential growth in your business. Join the launch event here. _____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsor(s): Levels: Real-time feedback on how diet impacts your health. levels.link/peter _____________ 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.

• 0:00Peter Diamandis?

  You know, in the old school companies, you would hire a consultant to tell you what to do.

• 0:04Speaker 01

  Well, that's gone today because the market is changing too fast.

• 0:08Peter Diamandis?

  The day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea.

• 0:11Speaker 01

  It's the most fundamental architectural process in life.

• 0:15Peter Diamandis?

  You never know where the breakthrough idea is going to come from.

• 0:17Speaker 01

  Your ability to adapt is going to drive market value.

• 0:20Peter Diamandis?

  Failure is okay.

• 0:21Speaker 01

  So you've just got to go with it. And so you have to be able to build that deeply into your business to succeed properly, especially in a volatile world.

• 0:28Peter Diamandis?

  So if you're an entrepreneur, starting a company, one of the things I, you know, beseech you to try is...

• 0:37Peter Diamandis?

  Welcome to our next episode of Moon Shots and Mindsets. I'm here with my dear friend, Salim Ismail, my co-author of our newest book, Exponential Organizations 2.0, the first CEO of Singularity University. Saleem, let's talk about one of my favorite subjects of an EXO, which is experimentation. You know, we're living in a world where your ability as an entrepreneur to experiment on your products and services at lightning speed is better than ever. And ultimately, you know, we're giving up our belief that we humans know what's right and saying, forget about that. Let's find out what actually works as a product and a service.

• 1:18Peter Diamandis?

  But before we get into that, my friend, would you refine, define what is an exponential organization?

• 1:26Speaker 01

  So, an EXO, as we call it, is a 21st century organizational design that goes away from the top-down hierarchical pyramid-style command and control structures of the 20th century and moves to a much flatter, experimentation-driven, purpose-driven, agile, flexible, scalable organization structure. And we found that we looked at the fastest-growing unicorns and teased out the model. So we're not kind of inventing something. We're putting labels on what already exists. And EXO is delivering typically 10x better, faster, cheaper than its peers in the same space. Just to give you a hard data point, we mapped the Fortune 100 against this model and found that the top 10 most EXO-friendly of the Fortune 100 outperform

• 2:10Speaker 01

  From the bottom ten, least like the least flexible, least agile of the Fortune one hundred, over a seven year period, delivered forty times better shareholder returns between the top ten and bottom ten. This just blows your mind. As the external world becomes more volatile, your ability to adapt is going to drive market value. Right? So if you're an EXO, a key driver of that adaptation is running experiments and constantly sensing the outside world.

• 2:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, people need to wake up to the fact that things have changed. This is not your dad's or your granddad's old business environment. People are building brand new types of companies that are outperforming multi-billion dollar conglomerate, global companies at lightning speed. So we talked about in previous podcasts, the idea that we have internal attributes that your company uses, your employees use to run an exponential organization and external ways that you manage the external world or you leverage the external world. And experiments are, you know, they cross both, right? You can run internal experiments and external. I'll mention this, you know, I have an EXO,

• 3:19Peter Diamandis?

  my PhD ventures that manages a lot of my companies and products. And I am constantly just demanding that the team be running experiments. And it's like, one of the things I realized is a lot of companies that are being born today, these are startups by entrepreneurs started today, are born

• 3:43Peter Diamandis?

  with a culture of experimentation. From the very beginning, they're running experimentation. Versus the old school, which was, you know, in the old school companies, you would hire a consultant to tell you what to do. And that consultant had, over time, built a model in their mind and you were paying them for their, for their knowledge, but that's just broken right now.

• 4:06Speaker 01

  It's completely broken and this is a really key point that's the difference between the old and the new, right? In the old, you rose to the leadership of a big company. Let's say you were the head of supply chain for BMW. It's because you ran supply chain at some local level and understood the dynamics of that. Then you rose to a country's supply chain level. Then you were supply chain for one type of a car and you understood, okay, if there's a bit of a recession, what suppliers do I go after, etc. And you rose in prominence over, usually by seniority and having deep intuition about that domain space.

• 4:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, intuition is really important.

• 4:39Speaker 01

  Intuition. You drove your thing by deep experience and intuition and you had a gut sense of how the market was operating. Well, that's gone today because the market is changing too fast. Anybody who's got twenty years of experience with supply chain of combustion engine cars is irrelevant as electric cars come along because the dynamics are completely different, right? So now, the only way to make sense and do sense-making of the outside world is constantly running experiments, testing the outside world. You think of an amoeba, right? Constantly probing outward from itself, trying to see what's going on and then absorbing the things that it sees as food. That's kind of the way we think of organizations in the future.

• 5:18Peter Diamandis?

  You know, it's interesting. As a young startup, you have, you go in with an assumption. You go in with what I think people are going to want. And then the ability to run not just a couple of experiments, like, you know, what subject line should we use? But thousands of experiments simultaneously, given the rise of, you know, generative AI and algorithms, is massive. And a lot of times, our intuition is wrong about what people want or what they're going to react to. And it's only when you run these experiments do you find yourself evolving the product rapidly. And you've got to be building an internal culture of experimentation, one in which

• 6:02Peter Diamandis?

  failure is okay, because if you're going to experiment, probably ninety to ninety-nine point nine percent of the time, you're going to be failing. And failure means, okay, I've learned something, I'm not going to do it that way.

• 6:14Speaker 01

  Exactly. You know, I got a little Sorry here, when I was at Yahoo, we came across this because A B testing on a website is kind of one of the original forms of experimentation. You throw out a million pages with this and a million pages with this, see what the responses and you have hard driven data as to what works. On the Yahoo homepage, there used to be seven headlines in the middle box, okay? And we found over tweaking this, if you reduced it to six or increased it to eight, the click throughs dropped off radically. But seven, for some reason, was a magic number that worked. Nobody knew why it worked. Nobody had any rationale for why that number worked. It doesn't make any sense at all, but for some reason, and we found that just from A B testing and trialing experimentation, that number works.

• 6:56Speaker 01

  So you go, okay, it works, you go with it, but you've no idea why and how, and that's the thesis of the external world. You may come across something that works, you can't explain how or why, so you just got to go with it. And the only way you're going to find that is running lots and lots of different tests and experiments. I was on stage with Steve Wozniak for an hour and a half debating this, and he called it tinker, right? Can you just get it and bang, just play, let your people just play with stuff and interesting things will happen.

• 7:22Peter Diamandis?

  A quick break from our episode. On June the 6th, Salim and I are going to be running a free three hour workshop on how to actually build and design an exponential organization. Would love to have you join us. If you join us on June the 6th, first of all, you'll get free access to the book, Exponential Organizations 2.0, access to an A I that we've built that allows you to query the book and helps you design your exponential organization. It's June the 6th, it's three hours, it's free, we've never done this before. Click on the link below, dmagnus.com backslash E X O and join us. All right, now back to the episode.

• 8:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and you know, it's a lot of for larger companies that are trying to figure out where they go next, right? Your products and services are stayed and you're trying to design, what do you do? I remember in my book Bold, we wrote about something called a five high five plan, which was a form of experimentation. Now, if you have a thousand employees, imagine forming groups of five and you say to them,

• 8:26Peter Diamandis?

  Listen, over the next five days, we want you to, in your group of five, which by the way, diversity in the group, like having an engineer and a scientist and, you know, executive assistant, like different groups, you're not, it's not all engineering or not all marketing. We're going to give you a $500 budget. We want you to go and experiment out there with designing your product or service. It works really well in the digital world, right? And if you get hundreds of ideas and they're experimented on, then you find a signal in the noise, like, huh, this idea that we didn't expect. And if you're running a 555 experiment, it's really important to incentivize people to try crazy ideas,

• 9:10Peter Diamandis?

  right? One of the things I like to say is the day before something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea, right? If it wasn't a crazy idea yesterday, then it wouldn't be a breakthrough today. It would be an incremental improvement. And so if in fact breakthroughs require experimenting with crazy ideas, you know, when I'm in the boardroom or I'm on stage like you are, I say, where's your crazy idea department inside your company? If you don't have one, if you don't allow your team to play with crazy ideas, you're stuck on incrementalism.

• 9:43Speaker 01

  You know, Amazon, in fact, actually measures this down to that level. They've asked for every team inside Amazon, you're asked, how many experiments did you run this quarter? How many succeeded? How many failed? If you're not running enough experiments and not enough are failing, your bonus gets dinged, right? Because you're constantly pushing the learning of the organization as a whole. Not by accident is Amazon one of the biggest companies in the world.

• 10:04Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, Jeff Holden, who's a friend, I haven't seen him in a while though, unfortunately, but Jeff was on my board at XPRIZE and he was the chief product officer at Amazon and also at Uber. And he was deeply involved. In fact, I think Amazon built a experimentation engine, I think it was called Morpheus.

• 10:23Speaker 01

  Morpheus, yeah.

• 10:24Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. And, and they were exactly doing that. It was like, They're running thousands of experiments. I remember Jeff Bezos, I quoted him, said, you know, the success of Amazon is a function of the number of experiments we run per year, per month, per day. And because we actually, as humans, are biased, but we don't know what works until you try it, until you try with check writers out there.

• 10:49Speaker 01

  So if we lift up a level, this gives the rationale for this, I think, very powerfully, because the external world today is so volatile and so unclear as to what's coming. We have 20 Gutenberg moments. You call them asteroid impacts. We've got pandemics. We've got bank closures. We've got geopolitical risk at a kind of a crazy level. The only way, you know, in the past, your senior executives, based on their intuition, would go off and hunker down and come up with a strategy. And you can't do that anymore. That's irrelevant. What you need to be doing today is basically running a thousand experiments, constantly probing the edges of the world and seeing what works and making, doing sense-making in that way, seeing what works and ruthlessly following that, even though it goes against

• 11:31Speaker 01

  your gut, that it might say, goes against your experience, goes against your intuition, just ruthlessly following that. Eric Rieskop talks about this as a startup, being an experiment looking for a business model. Right? That's a startup. And so you've just got to run tons of experiments. And you look at the biggest companies in the world, all of them started with tinkering. Okay? Larry and Sergey playing with algorithms and and Steven, Steve Jobs and Wozniak tinkering with a computer, playing around with Facebook groups. All of them started as little companies that experimented a lot and iterated like hell.

• 12:05Peter Diamandis?

  And sometimes your intuition, like you said, is wrong. So when Jeff Holden was telling me about at Amazon, when Prime was first proposed, you know, the idea of free shipping for people, it was thought of as a crazy idea. And and Bezos said, let's try it. And of course, Amazon Prime is now driving, you know, huge double-digit majority of their of their revenues. Their profits.

• 12:30Speaker 01

  It's incredible when when people come across those things in hindsight, it looks so obvious. Right. And at the time, it looked like a crazy idea, just as you talk about and you won't find them unless you have that culture. What I think is one of the most powerful developments today is with the rise of chat GPT and Auto GPT and some of the generative AI capabilities. We can now train AIs to run those experiments and even conceive of those experiments. So you should be kind of going, hey, AI, go run a thousand experiments on this domain and figure out what works.

• 13:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's we're getting there very quickly. And, you know, one of the companies out there that's one of probably the great experimenting companies of our of our lifetime is Google. Right. And Google not only experiments at the at the tiny level of, you know, bits on a, you know, sort of pixels on a page. They built something called Google X when Google went to Alphabet, it became known as X. And Astro Teller runs that and he's been on my stage now a number of times, a good friend and a brilliant individual. And he talks about the importance of rapid experimentation with companies.

• 13:44Peter Diamandis?

  So Google, Google X, I'll call it for the moment versus X, has built and experimented with thousands of companies. And you wouldn't know that because it's it's kept somewhat internally secret. I asked him, why do you keep all the companies you're experimenting with secret? And he said, because we kill so many of them so rapidly, we don't want to have on the front page of the news in San Jose. Google fails another company, right? It looks like we're we're doing poorly, but the idea of starting an experiment and failing it quickly is critical. Because if you have a startup. And a startup can be a single person spending their afternoons or weekends or a small team.

• 14:27Peter Diamandis?

  And you have a, you know, a thesis for what you're going to create, but after a period of time, you realize it's not working. The worst thing you want to do is keep spending your time and your money on that. So the best thing you can do is kill it quickly and then recycle those individuals into another idea.

• 14:45Speaker 01

  And make sure you trap the, the learning. I may have some small part of to play in this, Peter. In 2010, we had a Singularity event and Larry Page was there. Remember he came and spoke at the closing ceremonies?

• 14:57Peter Diamandis?

  I remember that.

• 14:58Speaker 01

  And he, he grabbed me at the reception afterwards and he said, hey, your, your brick house unit at Yahoo was really great. Should I do that at Google?

• 15:03Peter Diamandis?

  And what did he say?

• 15:04Speaker 01

  Right? And I said, no. I said, don't do it because Yahoo used our innovation unit as a PR exercise to show the world that we're really cool, which put a massive spotlight on us, which meant we couldn't fail. Right? I said, keep it stealth and point it into adjacent areas. And now, you know, obviously lots of his own thinking, but then that essentially is Google X, where they keep it stealth. You have to be able to fail elegantly and take the learnings. The, the thing that I remember that was the most powerful from your conversations with Astro was that when they do a project at X, they, they will say, what are the 10 reasons that this might fail?

• 15:42Peter Diamandis?

  Can I?

• 15:43Speaker 01

  Let them go and tell us.

• 15:44Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 15:45Speaker 01

  It's really important heuristic.

• 15:46Peter Diamandis?

  It's called a pre-mortem. So we all know what a post-mortem is, like after a project has failed or product or service or company, you look back and say, okay, why did it fail? And he said, what we do is something called a pre-mortem. So before we launch a product or a service, we get together with the team and we say, okay, I want you to imagine that we are three months after the launch of the product or the service and it failed miserably. And you know why it failed. Write down on a piece of paper, the reason that this product failed. And they collect all of those and then they discuss them. And sometimes they find actually great reasons why this is going to fail, but no one was,

• 16:29Peter Diamandis?

  was felt permission to share their idea. So anyway, that's, for me, these ideas of a pre-mortem are, are super powerful.

• 16:38Speaker 01

  What I loved about, what I loved about that approach was they take the reasons, the biggest reasons why it might fail and they, and they test those first. Right? And then you should be able to knock that idea off the perch pretty quickly. If you take the top highest reasons it may fail, and then it's just work your way down the list. But if you get to the end of the list, this is going to be a successful product because you worked out all the big issues.

• 17:00Peter Diamandis?

  This episode is brought to you by Levels. One of the most important things that I do to try and maintain my peak vitality and longevity is to monitor my blood glucose. More importantly, the foods that I eat and how they peak the glucose levels in my blood. Now, glucose is the fuel that powers your brain. It's really important. High prolonged levels of glucose, what's called hyperglycemia, leads to everything from heart disease to Alzheimer's, to sexual dysfunction, to diabetes, and it's not good. The challenge is all of us are different. All of us respond to different foods in different ways. Like for me, if I eat bananas, it spikes my blood glucose. If I eat grapes, it doesn't.

• 17:40Peter Diamandis?

  If I eat bread by itself, I get this prolonged spike in my blood glucose levels. But if I dip that bread in olive oil, it blunts it. And these are things that I've learned from wearing a continuous glucose monitor and using the Levels app. So Levels is a company that helps you in analyzing what's going on in your body. It's continuous monitoring 24/7. I wear it all the time. Really helps me to stay on top of the food I eat, remain conscious of the food that I eat, and to understand which foods affect me based upon my physiology and my genetics. You know, on this podcast, I only recommend products and services that I use, that I use not only for myself,

• 18:23Peter Diamandis?

  but my friends and my family, that I think are high quality and safe and really impact a person's life. So, check it out. Levels.link/peter. Give you two additional months of membership, and it's something that I think everyone should be doing. Eventually, this stuff is going to be in your body, on your body, part of our future of medicine today. It's a product that I think I'm going to be using for the years ahead and hope you'll consider as well. I mean, there's so many other things that have changed in the world that allow us to do rapid experimentation, like, you know, basically being able to launch a website product even before it exists, or go out with Google search terms and see whether people will

• 19:08Peter Diamandis?

  search on your term, or you can describe an offering, get people to the credit card page where they would click to buy, and say, "I'm sorry, this product is not available right now, but when it becomes available, we'll let you know. Thank you for your willingness to buy." I mean, you can run virtualized experiments on virtualized products and get the data to the point where, you know, I'm pretty clear this is going to function.

• 19:34Speaker 01

  We talked about this in the last episode a bit, but it's worth restating Kickstarter.

• 19:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, I love Kickstarter.

• 19:40Speaker 01

  Crowdfunding means that for the first time in the history of business, you can get market validation for a product before you build a product. Right? That's just unbelievably powerful to getting an idea out to market, especially for consumer-facing products. And I think this is where this entire, even think about the idea that the evolution itself operates on an experimentation basis, right? We throw out gene mutations and you see what works, and those survive by natural selection. It's the most fundamental archetypal process in life. And so you have to be able to build that deeply into your business to succeed properly, especially in a volatile world.

• 20:18Peter Diamandis?

  So if you're an entrepreneur, starting a company, or you're in a company and you're managing a team, one of the things I, you know, beseech you to try is building a culture of experimentation that constantly be describing experiments that you're going to run, what you're looking for as the answer, and then run those experiments. And at a minimum, it, you know, it's the subject line of the emails you're sending out. At a maximum, it's like, let's come up with 10 variations of the business and try an MVP in some of those and see what actually works.

• 20:56Speaker 01

  MVP, for those unfamiliar, is from Lean Startup, was the Minimum Viable Product. Right? What's the smallest set of features that get it out there and allow you to test and iterate? When we were building products at Yahoo, Peter, I remember Katerina, we brought Katerina Fake to come in. She was the founder of Flickr. And she would say to the teams, okay, great, you're building this product with 20 features. Fabulous. It's going to take you two years. Give me the two features that are going to have it succeed. Which are the two out of the 20 that go, oh, this and this? She'd go, great, build those two. Show me that the product succeeds at all and then iterate and add the others rest. Don't wait till you've built 20 features before you get out there, you may fail. So that's essentially the birth of that entire idea of MVP. Critical idea.

• 21:40Speaker 01

  You can take the smallest feature footprint, get it out there and iterate very, very fast.

• 21:44Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, what you're battling as an EXO is what I'd call the tyranny of confidence. Like, you know what the right answer is. And the reality is, you don't. And you've got to be running these experiments. And it's easy for a startup, especially at T equals zero in the culture, for you as the founder or founders to say, just, you know, every time you're meeting, it's like, what are the experiments we're running? What are the variations we're running? What's the data we're collecting? And just getting into that mindset of rapid experimentation. If you're a large company and you're dealing with the tyranny of confidence,

• 22:25Peter Diamandis?

  the tyranny of seniority, you know, which is a problem.

• 22:31Speaker 01

  It's a huge issue. I love that phrasing tyranny of confidence. You know what solves that is the dedication to the MTP. Right? If you're really trying to solve that problem, okay, it doesn't matter how many times you fail. It doesn't matter. You just keep plugging away at it because you're so emotionally excited and connected to the problem space.

• 22:51Peter Diamandis?

  So let's talk about experimentation in large companies. I mentioned the idea of a large company running these 555 experiments. It's unleashing, you never know. And one of the important things here is you never know where the breakthrough idea is going to come from. You think it's going to come from your head of engineering or your, you know, but it could be the person in literally the production in the mailroom or the executive assistant who happened to put two or two together. It's typically, again, a crazy idea. It's not coming from your normal sources. So how do you tap into the wealth of knowledge inside your organization?

• 23:26Speaker 01

  This is, this is the hardest thing for big companies to adopt because big companies don't tolerate failure, right? It's what we call a C L M, a career limiting move. You fail, you're done, right? That's the basic ethos. So people stay, keep it safe and they never test and experiment. And this is the hardest cultural paradigm to shift. That's why you have to build a company as an E X O to start or start E X Os at the edge in order to do this. You have to, and you can turn it into a game. You know what Adobe did that was really successful? They gave every employee a red box, a shoebox with startup instructions and a thousand dollar check. And they said, if your manager won't let you build some feature or some product that you think was worth building, here's

• 24:09Speaker 01

  a thousand dollars, go build it, go hire some developers in Estonia or India or wherever and start building that. So people got together, pooled their red boxes, got together 10, 20, 30 grand and started building features. And it turned out something like 50% of Adobe's revenues three years later came from those red box programs.

• 24:27Peter Diamandis?

  That's crazy.

• 24:28Speaker 01

  It's crazy. If you let them go, and you know, Google talks about this as their 20% time, right? Which yielded Gmail. 3M, I think, is the most legendary. They would give their researchers 30% time to tinker and play. Okay. I think in today's world, it's got to be 50 to 70% of time. Like, let people just play around and you'll find those results are where things work.

• 24:53Peter Diamandis?

  One of the other places you can go to get great ideas that you might not think about is not inside your organization, but it's the community out there, right? It's your, your customers and people who love what you do and what you stand for.

• 25:08Speaker 01

  Well, this is where community and crowd are so critical as elements, right? If you can run experiments in the community, it gives you a Free place to test things and then you bring them in.

• 25:17Peter Diamandis?

  And you know, you've given an example before of actually going at the community and saying, what features should we add? What products should we create?

• 25:24Speaker 01

  Yeah, this is Chris Anderson doing DIY drones did this. You know, you've got 300,000 people that are drones enthusiasts. When they want a product, they just go, what do you guys want? And they go, oh, we want a DIY kit. Great. That's that drives your product development. And I think successfully running and asking the community or getting your community to run experiments and sourcing that back in is essentially the future of most products going forward in the world.

• 25:50Peter Diamandis?

  But in order to run an organization that is that experimental, it's got to be agile, it's got to be data driven. You have to be able to actually collect the information, measure it and make decisions based upon the data.

• 26:06Speaker 01

  There's some critical cultural prerequisites, right? You have to have the culture allowing failure. You have to have an MTP, by the way. So and you have to, the third one you really need, we'll talk about this in another episode, is autonomy. You know, GE worked with Eric Reese and they ran the biggest corporate training exercise in business history. They trained 60,000 managers on Lean Startup, okay? And it failed. And it failed, why? Because they didn't have autonomy, okay? They were expected to experiment only in that particular domain, which blows the reason for experimentation. It's and our it's antithetical to experimentation and play and tinkering, right? And so there there's some prerequisites. It's not an easy attribute to put into legacy organizations.

• 26:49Speaker 01

  Maybe the one of the hardest, but it's the most critical.

• 26:52Peter Diamandis?

  You know, it's interesting. I was just on a board meeting yesterday of Vatom, which is Eric Poulier's company that creates these extraordinary metaverse experiences. And they've built the toolkits that allow people to build on top of their platform. And the stuff that was coming out of it would have, you know, the company's relatively small engineering staff. And what these other companies were building was crazy, right? So it's like Roblox as well. You know, Roblox offers a a platform that allows other people to build.

• 27:33Peter Diamandis?

  You know, games on top of, and so they get thousands of new games. And there's no way that the internal team could have built any of these successful games at scale.

• 27:42Speaker 01

  Yeah, so this becomes incredible if you can build a platform and offer toolsets to a community and let them build on top of you. Then you're onto a total winner and nobody will unseat you from that because you're, you're the coral reef, right? And a million little organisms are running around building on top of your coral reef and adding to it as time goes by.

• 28:01Peter Diamandis?

  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.

• 28:41Peter 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 demandis.com backslash blog and learn more. Now back to the episode. So we, just to wrap this up, I want to just bring back how all of these EXO internal and external attributes work together. So we've been talking about experimentation here and experimentation works when you've

• 29:21Peter Diamandis?

  got access to, first of all, AI and algorithms to help you analyze the data you're experimenting with. The second is you have dashboards that allow you to measure. How and track which experiments are working and which are going in the wrong direction because if you're building an EXO, things move fast and you need those dashboards to be live and visual to everybody involved. Autonomy, like you just said, to allow teams to go off and try crazy ideas because if they can't have the autonomy to try to follow their, you know, their gut and try things out, then, then you're, then you're stuck. And then, you know, we talk about community and crowd, which is you can tap the community

• 30:04Peter Diamandis?

  and crowd to help generate ideas for you and then engagement for you to be able to like engage them, incentivize them to play these games with you.

• 30:14Speaker 01

  And then the MTP becomes the guiding directive thing saying, okay, this is the direction which we're going. You know, if you look, think about your X prizes, Peter, right? Super proud to be on the board and the way, the what got me so excited is you have a huge problem like curing cancer or fighting wildfires, right? And then you get, you're, you're essentially allowing the entire world to run experiments and win an incentive prize as a result of that experiment. Right? So you're, you've, I think X prizes learned how to run experiments at scale in the crowd at a global level, unlike any other organization in the world.

• 30:50Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, thank you for that and I'm very proud of what, what the team has, has done. You know, I, I think it's important to realize that MTP as the guiding line, and we'll come back to that again, and I think everybody here is, please, if you're an entrepreneur, if you're running a company, even if you're running, you know, part of a company or for yourself or for your family, having a massive transformative purpose that helps you decide what to do and what not to do. You know, I'll go back to that quote from Martine Rothblatt, uh, where she said, listen, the difference between successful and very successful people is successful people, um, learn to say no to a lot of things. Very successful people say no to almost everything. They're focused, right?

• 31:34Peter Diamandis?

  And if you're running experiments inside of an organization, you know, you want to make sure that your experiments, if you're a, a coding company, don't take you into making shoes. I mean, it's like, what's your, what's your purpose in life and running experiments that all are marching in the right direction because you might find yourself. In a business area that you don't care about anymore and money is not a reason to be making a business work. It really is to make a difference on the planet and money comes along with that.

• 32:03Speaker 01

  You know, I've I struggle with this because I get excited about so many things. I'm terrible at this. The focusing and the no, I'm like, oh, let's do that. Let's do that. And then you end up chasing a ton of butterflies and you're not effective at all. So the MTV becomes critically important to kind of keeping yourself on the on the on the rails.

• 32:21Peter Diamandis?

  All right, buddy. Well, this was fun. Again, just to echo experimentation is something you can now do. It wasn't something easily done even 20 years ago, but today experimentation is table stakes and your ability to use AI, to use the crowd, to be running experiments is fundamental to being an exponential organization because your intuition may not be what actually is the best decision for your product or service.

• 32:49Speaker 01

  An easy thing to try. Go to chat GPT and say, here's my company. What experiments should I be running?

• 32:55Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 32:56Speaker 01

  And just query, just run some iterative queries on that. You'll find something, you know, some amazing things to test and try out. Pricing models, customer action, behavior of changes, et cetera, et cetera.

• 33:07Peter Diamandis?

  All right, pal. Good to have this conversation.

• 33:09Speaker 01

  Great.

• 33:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, excited for exponential organizations 2.0 to make a difference in the world.

• 33:14Speaker 01

  It's a big experiment.

• 33:15Peter Diamandis?

  It is.