What Separates Billion-Dollar Companies From Failed Startups w/ Bill Gross | EP #105

In this episode, Peter and Bill discuss a secret company they launched 24 years ago and failed, and what it takes to build a Moonshot company. 02:48 | The Secret Moonshot of 1999 20:45 | The Key to Successful Entrepreneurship 48:12 | Exposing the Business Idea Myth Bill Gross founded Idealab in March 1996. Bill is a lifelong entrepreneur, starting his first solar business in high school. He is best known as the Founder, past CEO, and now Chairman of Idealab. This technology incubator has launched numerous successful startups, creating over 150 companies with over 45 IPOS and acquisitions ($9 billion market value). These companies span across various industries, including e-commerce, clean energy, and internet services (e.g., Heliogen, Lumin, Papaya). Gross is recognized for his innovative approach to business and has played a significant role in shaping the startup ecosystem. Learn more about Idealab here: https://idealab.com/ ____________ I only endorse products and services I personally use. To see what they are, please support this podcast by checking out our sponsors: Get started with Fountain Life and become the CEO of your health: https://fountainlife.com/peter/ AI-powered precision diagnosis you NEED for a healthy gut: https://www.viome.com/peter _____________ Get my new Longevity Practices 2024 book: https://bit.ly/48Hv1j6 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 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.

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• 1:00Speaker 03

  You've always talked about how you can really make an impact on the world when you can touch a billion people's lives or make a billion people's lives better. The chance to reach that many people now with something powerful is insane.

• 1:15Peter Diamandis?

  I celebrate those entrepreneurs like yourself, like Elon Musk, that are willing to just bet it all over and over and over again.

• 1:23Speaker 03

  Every company is going to be very difficult. Do we keep on having the passion for it? We have to do that over and over again. There's very, very few stories that are just purely up and to the right. There's many ways to make the world a better place. You can do it by being a teacher, preacher. You can be a lawyer. You can change rules and laws to make the world different. But you can be an entrepreneur. It's a really incredible way. Everything is going to be hard. Since it's going to be hard, may as well do something bigger.

• 1:45Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:48Peter Diamandis?

  Welcome to Moonshots. I'm about to sit down with Bill Gross, truly one of the most extraordinary moonshot entrepreneurs on the planet. And I think of individuals who keep up with folks like Elon Musk. Bill is right there. He's built over 150 companies, 50 of which have gone public or been acquired. He's had over 5,000 ideas over and over again. He's putting his ideas forward, building them, and creating extraordinary entrepreneurial ventures. We're going to talk about the 10 lessons he's learned over 50 years of being an entrepreneur that for me is pure gold. So let's tune in to Bill Gross, the 10 ideas that help you become a moonshot entrepreneur. Bill, it is so amazing to be back here at Idea Lab. It's great to have you here.

• 2:33Peter Diamandis?

  I had such a blast, literally, for the years that I was here working with you. And again, I just introduced you, but thank you for the work you do. Oh, thank you. You've inspired me a lot. Yeah, well, and you and me, I mean, we both have the same mission, which is to have entrepreneurs take on the world's biggest problems. I like to say the world's biggest problems, the world's biggest business opportunities, right? And if anything giving on this podcast today, I'm excited to share your tricks on doing big things, taking moonshots, how to finance those companies, how to, you know, to give them the highest probability of success.

• 3:17Peter Diamandis?

  So again, the numbers just blow me away. 175 startups and how many acquisitions or IPOs? We've had 50. 50. That's incredible. I mean, those odds beat across the board, what we're seeing in every aspect of the entrepreneurial world. You know, I'm going to get into a little bit more of your moonshots in a minute because I want to hear about what you're most excited about. But you and I have kept a secret for 20, 24 years now of our first moonshot that we did together. And I want to tell the world about it. A little moonshot.

• 4:01Peter Diamandis?

  A little moonshot. And I want to tell the world about this. And I want to see if your remembrance of it is the same as mine. So. I think the story begins with you first on where the idea came from. So why don't you tell that part of the story?

• 4:17Speaker 03

  Well, ever since seeing humans land on the moon, I was fascinated with that. It had a big impact on my life. It made many people inspired about math and science.

• 4:27Peter Diamandis?

  How old were you when, in 1969?

• 4:28Speaker 03

  I was 11 years old.

• 4:29Peter Diamandis?

  And I was nine, so eight, nine, yeah.

• 4:30Speaker 03

  And my brother was eight.

• 4:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 4:33Speaker 03

  And Larry and I really, really dreamed of going into space, but of getting back to the moon, of owning something from space, anything related to space. I remember actually, when eBay launched, I was really excited to go find a moon rock. And I started looking to search if there was a moon rock available, but you can't own a moon rock. But we found out there was an auction where you could buy a patch, a patch of someone who had landed on the moon who had some moon dust in it. And that was so exciting to even have anything that had been to the moon and back.

• 5:03Peter Diamandis?

  Did you buy it?

• 5:04Speaker 03

  I did get that.

• 5:05Peter Diamandis?

  Do you remember how much it cost you back then?

• 5:06Speaker 03

  I don't remember. It was at an auction at Sotheby's in New York, and Larry went there for me. And it was really, really incredible. But the idea of getting back to the moon was so exciting, and we're right in the backyard of JPL. And the internet was taking off, and the idea of having sponsors and advertising and allowing people to control with a joystick, the educational possibilities of getting a new generation of kids excited about the moon was too compelling to not follow through on.

• 5:33Peter Diamandis?

  So just to set the timing here, this is 1999.

• 5:36Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 5:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I mean, this is the peak of the dot com insanity.

• 5:41Speaker 03

  And the idea of doing something mechanical, when everything else was internet only, was very, very enticing. And I'm a mechanical engineer from Caltech, and my brother from Caltech as well, really thought we could do something like that. And then, meeting you, we really thought, we can pull this off.

• 5:56Peter Diamandis?

  So my end of the story now is, I got a call from your brother Larry. And I remember exactly where I was. And it's like, you know, "Hi, Peter, Larry Gross here. My brother and I want to recruit you to be CEO of one of our companies." Now, I had not heard of Idealab at that point. I'd heard of Idealab companies. But, you know, some quick searching got me like, "Okay, okay, okay, what? Really?" So the call said, "We want to do a private mission to the moon."

• 6:30Peter Diamandis?

  I remember flying out to meet Larry in person, meet you, meet Marcia. And my memory of that was pulling up to the front here, what, one hundred and thirty West Union Street. Pulling up to the front door in December nineteen ninety nine. And I remember seeing Porsches and Lamborghinis and Mercedes double parked too, too wide, right? It's like literally, it was like cars, like these expensive cars all up and down the street. And I remember walking in the front door and everyone was running. Everyone was running.

• 7:07Speaker 03

  We had a whirl of activity.

• 7:09Peter Diamandis?

  It was such high energy, right? At this dot com, like just pinnacle, it's running, running, running.

• 7:15Speaker 03

  We were at the center.

• 7:16Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, my God, you were at the center. I mean, at that point, you know, name some of the companies that you had going on.

• 7:22Speaker 03

  We had Cars Direct, we had Etoys dot com.

• 7:24Peter Diamandis?

  Go to.

• 7:25Speaker 03

  We had GoTo that went public, we had City Search that went public, we had merged with Ticketmaster. We were just, it was really crazy times, really, really exciting.

• 7:31Peter Diamandis?

  But it was like people couldn't walk to the restroom, you had to run there to save those microseconds and go work on your business. And, and so we sat down and you're like, I was running the X Prize Foundation and Zero G at the time. I remember that. X Prize in nineteen ninety nine, we had not raised the ten million yet. And Zero G had not flown its missions yet, we were going through our STC process. They would both happen about four years later. And you made me a job offer. Now, I had never had a job before, you know, I was always, as an entrepreneur, doing my own things. But it was like, how can, how do you turn down? And so I remember you said, listen, we have a fully funded mission to the moon.

• 8:16Peter Diamandis?

  Cause you had just raised a billion dollars in cash. Which was a lot of money back then. I mean, we throw a billion dollars around like it's nothing today. And I think you had said, okay, we're gonna allocate sixty million dollars to do a private moon mission. And I remember your pitch to me was, we're gonna do this privately, we're gonna land on the moon, and we're gonna send back the signal, and people are gonna pay for advertising and pay for rights, and we'll carry stuff and sponsorship. We'll do this like a sporting event, going to the moon. Is that what you remember?

• 8:53Speaker 03

  Yeah, and you were gonna get National Geographic to cover it. We're gonna do a making of video. We're gonna follow all the technology. We really wanted to make an educational experience.

• 9:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean, you and I had both been so impacted, and Larry, impacted by the lunar mission. I went home, I don't know if you know this, I sold, I was living in Rockville, Maryland. I sold my house in one day.

• 9:14Speaker 03

  I did not know that.

• 9:15Peter Diamandis?

  I sold my house in one day. I literally took the first bid, packed it up, and moved to Pasadena. And, and then it was, we were on a mission to like, build the team that could privately go to the moon. Now, people have to remember this, this is before SpaceX, before Blue Origin, before any of these companies were around, and the idea, let alone of building rockets, but the idea of building a lunar lander and going there. And we ended up hiring some of the best talent out of JPL, like you said, just down the block over here. Tony Spear, who had run the Sojourner mission that landed on the moon, right, that little cute

• 10:00Peter Diamandis?

  little robot.

• 10:01Speaker 03

  You put together an amazing team. You really put together an amazing team. They were so talented.

• 10:05Peter Diamandis?

  They were. We had beautiful designs. And I remember one day, you said to me, Peter, I want to introduce you to somebody who's gonna be a great director of photography. Do you remember who that was?

• 10:21Speaker 03

  Unbelievable.

• 10:22Peter Diamandis?

  Jim Cameron shows up and.

• 10:26Speaker 03

  Oh, he had so many ideas for how to make it better. He not only was he director of photography, he had storytelling ideas.

• 10:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 10:32Speaker 03

  He said, instead of just one lunar lander, you need to have two little children that move near the mommy.

• 10:36Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, the third person perspective, right?

• 10:38Speaker 03

  And and he really, really.

• 10:40Peter Diamandis?

  He really drove up our mass budget, our budget in general.

• 10:43Speaker 03

  Definitely.

• 10:44Peter Diamandis?

  But it's incredible to have Jim Cameron, you know, in brainstorming sessions with us of what kind of cameras we're going to use and what the positioning was and what we had to do on the moon. And I mean.

• 10:54Speaker 03

  We didn't even have HD cameras at that time, but he had just invented one.

• 10:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 10:58Speaker 03

  So some of the first AC footage was going to come back from the moon because the early pictures from the moon were very grainy, except for the photographs they took, but the actual live footage was poor. So we were going to solve that.

• 11:08Peter Diamandis?

  And I remember we decided to keep it under wraps. We wanted to keep it a secret. For whatever reasons, I guess we wanted to have a a big, you know, debut moment. And so we didn't tell anybody, we didn't announce the company. I in in retrospect, I think we may have had some people out there really come to us if they if we had known it. But the next thing we had to do was we had to buy, you know, we weren't building rockets, we were building the landers. So we had to go buy rockets. So the first rocket we bought was a member from Orbital Science, I was in rocket business back then. We bought a

• 11:46Peter Diamandis?

  a Taurus. Then the size of our of our lander grew and then we bought bought a Taurus XL. And then the size of our lander grew, we bought a an Athena two launch vehicle, which was in storage, which doubled the mass. And then our payload grew again. And then Larry and I were in Russia shopping shopping for rockets. This is a couple of, like a year or two before Elon went to Russia shopping, we bought a Dnepr, which is an old ICBM that could like launch all the mass we could possibly want to the lunar surface. It was crazy.

• 12:22Speaker 03

  Really, really incredible.

• 12:24Peter Diamandis?

  And then, well, along the way, I remember, okay, you said, Peter.

• 12:32Peter Diamandis?

  We'll fund this, but I'm putting the first 12 million. And at this point, you know, you'd raised a billion of capital, but you're shepherding the money. Um, I think you were in, back then, in the goal of taking Idea Lab public and you had to buy back public shares and, and so you said, okay, here's 12 million to start with and let's go out and raise some money. So, we're out on the road together.

• 12:55Speaker 03

  And we had a lot of people this close.

• 12:57Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we did. Steven Spielberg involved.

• 12:59Speaker 03

  Yeah, we had a lot of people.

• 13:00Peter Diamandis?

  Having James Cameron and Steven Spielberg on a private mission to the moon. I mean, it doesn't get cooler than that. I, I remember going outside and looking up at the full moon and that had a completely different meaning. Crazy.

• 13:12Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 13:13Peter Diamandis?

  Crazy.

• 13:14Speaker 03

  So it's really a shame it didn't work out, but it was really, really an incredible effort.

• 13:17Peter Diamandis?

  Well, the reason it worked out was the dot com crash. I'll, I'll never forget, you know, April of 2001 hits and, you know, you're, you're trying to raise money for what? Uh, but I, I think we would have had a good shot.

• 13:33Speaker 03

  Yeah. And it's hard as, as you, as we've seen since then.

• 13:36Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 13:37Speaker 03

  It's amazing no one has done it since then.

• 13:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, you know, on the heels of the, the company called Blastoff.

• 13:42Speaker 03

  A great name, by the way. We had blastoff.com.

• 13:44Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, blastoff.com, yeah. And, and I, I like to say blastoff splashed down. Uh, my biggest achievement at the end was not bankrupting the company, but, and placing the employees. I was so proud of, of placing our employees and putting the assets aside. Uh, and, and then, you know, I remember one day, this, this is April, we have a all hands meeting, you know, you just saw the NASDAQ crash and we've got to, we've got to put the company in mothballs. I get a call from you and Larry and you say, Peter, it's, I remember it was on my birthday, it was May 20th.

• 14:22Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 14:23Peter Diamandis?

  And, uh, he said, there's someone you have to meet. And I don't know if you remember this, but I was in a different, we're in a deal at, uh, uh, conference room here.

• 14:32Speaker 03

  You were down there.

• 14:33Peter Diamandis?

  And the other one over there and in walks Deo Resi and Elon Musk. And Elon had just sold PayPal, PayPal to eBay. And we're trying to pitch him on getting involved in this.

• 14:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, incredible. Well, there's a great story about this that relates to the bigger story of entrepreneurship. And what you started the conversation with. There's many ways to make the world a better place. You can do it by being a teacher and teach people. You can be a preacher, you can be a lawyer, you can change rules and laws to make the world different. But you can be an entrepreneur. It's a really incredible way. As an entrepreneur, you can make your product that gets pulled as opposed to pushing it on people. And it's only one of the ways to make the world a better place, but it's a very powerful way. And because we had set this company up as an entrepreneurial venture, we were able to take some people who were working sort of hourly, by the book, getting their job done,

• 15:30Speaker 03

  and unlock human potential by bringing them to a company where they felt like they're in control, they have equity, they have a say in what we do. The team you put together was amazing.

• 15:40Peter Diamandis?

  It was an audacious mission.

• 15:41Speaker 03

  And it was audacious. And when you get people behind an audacious mission, you can get people to do things that never would have been possible before. And that's what I love about entrepreneurship in general.

• 15:49Peter Diamandis?

  You know, one of the lessons I learned and one of the challenges we solved that I would have never thought it. I don't know if you remember what the most difficult part of our mission was.

• 16:02Speaker 03

  I don't.

• 16:03Peter Diamandis?

  It was getting the bandwidth back to the earth.

• 16:06Speaker 03

  For the image quality we wanted.

• 16:08Peter Diamandis?

  And also then getting it distributed. So I remember going and meeting with Akamai. Remember Akamai back then?

• 16:13Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 16:14Peter Diamandis?

  Our largest budget item on this mission was, first of all, we had to use the Deep Space Network to get the imagery back from the moon. We hadn't negotiated that yet, but once it came back down to JPL or Goddard or wherever it hit the earth, to distribute it to millions of people back in 1999, 2000.

• 16:33Speaker 03

  Yeah, this is before broadband, this is before.

• 16:34Peter Diamandis?

  Way before.

• 16:35Speaker 03

  Before fiber was everywhere.

• 16:36Peter Diamandis?

  It was, the budget for distribution was bigger than our launch budget.

• 16:41Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 16:42Peter Diamandis?

  And so we came up with another company, which is what one does here at Ideallab, was called Desktop TV. It was peer-to-peer networking.

• 16:52Speaker 03

  I remember that, yeah.

• 16:53Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 16:54Speaker 03

  Well, so many times. You have to invent things to make things work, but also sometimes you have to wait for those things to be invented and at scale to help you make it. And that that comes back to timing, which is relevant for so many things.

• 17:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, we'll talk about that in a moment, one of your brilliant insights. Yeah, I'll just say for folks listening, the it frustrated me so much that this mission didn't occur because it was all of us invested so much of our time and reputation and and energy and it was just a beloved mission. It's like you would work on it for free, right? It was like it was a holy calling, right? That's how people feel when they're working at SpaceX or Blue Origin or X Prize and others. We and I remember after the Ansari X Prize got won in 2004, I was up at the Googleplex. Larry was on our board and Sergey was a benefactor.

• 17:43Speaker 03

  That was such a huge accomplishment.

• 17:44Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it was fun.

• 17:45Speaker 03

  I remember the celebrations around that and just seeing the joy on people's faces when that was accomplished.

• 17:51Peter Diamandis?

  Someone didn't die.

• 17:52Speaker 03

  Really, really incredible.

• 17:54Peter Diamandis?

  And so Sergey said to me, what do you want to do as the next X Prize? And I told him about Blastoff and I said, I want to do a lunar X Prize, a lunar, you know, landing. And so we took what we were planning to do with Blastoff and turned it into an X Prize. Google put up $30 million and it ran for 10 years. They extended it twice and no one had achieved it and they shut it down. But four alumni, three have gone to the moon and had an energetic landing, let's just say it that way.

• 18:28Speaker 03

  Unplanned.

• 18:29Peter Diamandis?

  Unplanned.

• 18:30Speaker 03

  Disassembly.

• 18:31Peter Diamandis?

  Israeli team went there first, that we had a Japanese team and the US team. There's another US team going shortly and.

• 18:41Speaker 03

  Sort of proving how hard it is.

• 18:42Peter Diamandis?

  It is, it's hard. It's hard.

• 18:44Speaker 03

  Well, I remember you said the one of the most expensive things was the bandwidth. I remember the things when the engineers were talking, it was great to listen to those great JPL engineers discuss the details they had to do. You have to worry about thermal expansion from the front to the back or the thing that's in the shade, the part that's in the shade is so cold and the part that's in the sun is so hot, like every little detail you have to worry about when you're in space that you don't. Have to worry about on Earth. Really, really incredible engineering challenge.

• 19:08Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, and we can maybe look as we go through your lessons and you've just given a brilliant DLD talk on the 10 most important lessons you've learned over 50 years as an entrepreneur. And you started at the age of 12, right? So it's pretty damn good. And I can't wait to talk through them. I obviously have experienced all of them in some way, shape or form.

• 19:34Speaker 03

  You lived them, right?

• 19:36Peter Diamandis?

  But they're all, it's a beautiful, you know, distillation. And so we'll talk about that. Maybe we can talk about part of this blast off mission as an example. And then what I'd also like to do is talk about some of your current big moon shots. But before we do that, I want to show you a video that you haven't seen yet. And it's the sizzle reel from Blastoff. This was done by Bob Weiss. Bob was my COO. He came out of Hollywood. He was a film producer, done The Blues Brothers. Anyway, if you don't mind going to the next slide and let's play this video.

• 20:15Speaker 03

  Bob did some of my favorite movies of all time, too. Some of my favorite comedies.

• 20:26Speaker 03

  I really didn't know he had made this.

• 20:29Speaker 05

  But for the past year, an amazing team of scientists and engineers has been plotting a rendezvous with history.

• 20:37Speaker 05

  What if we told you that this team wants you to be part of their mission?

• 20:43Speaker 05

  And what if we told you that this was all part of a secret government program to go back to the moon for the first time in 30 years?

• 21:01Speaker 06

  We'd be lying. We're not the government, but we are going for the moon.

• 21:07Speaker 06

  Look how old the CGI is. It's incredible.

• 21:14Speaker 06

  Company called Blastoff.

• 21:20Speaker 06

  There's a fundamental truth to our nature, man must explore.

• 21:29Speaker 03

  Wow.

• 21:30Peter Diamandis?

  Blastoff.com.

• 21:31Speaker 03

  That's incredible.

• 21:32Peter Diamandis?

  It was, what a joyful couple of years that was. Amazing team and almost. And so now the world knows about it.

• 21:43Speaker 03

  Great memories.

• 21:44Peter Diamandis?

  So Bill, when you're looking at, I mean, you're ultimately investing your heart and soul, your reputation, your capital, investors' capital.

• 21:58Peter Diamandis?

  There has to be some kind of a threshold because how many, let me put it this way, how many ideas a day and a week and a month do you come up with? And then there's got to be a threshold like this is good enough, not only good, this is, I need to, I need to do this.

• 22:11Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 22:12Peter Diamandis?

  Right?

• 22:12Speaker 03

  So there's a lot of factors we try and apply, but there have been 5,000 ideas that we narrowed down to only starting 175 companies. So they go through a lot of gates before we decide to start a company. And those gates include, one, can we find some intellectual property that we feel is unique or novel relative to what everybody else is doing? Will it really advance the state of the art? Are we doing something that wouldn't happen otherwise? Because we really want to do something that pushes a boundary and not just is repetitive to something else that's out there. So that's one criteria that we put things through. Another is, does it grow on us? Do we keep on having the passion for it? Every company is going to be very difficult. There's always going to be challenges.

• 22:50Peter Diamandis?

  Anything big and bold is hard to do.

• 22:52Speaker 03

  So, so we're really, really looking to see if we have the passion to carry through and if we can find other leaders to have the passion to carry through. So take Blastoff as one example. If we hadn't found someone like you, who was equally passionate as we were about it to take it forward and who could be a leader for it, we couldn't do it. So we were looking and I'm really glad Larry reached out to you and I'm really glad you said yes, but we have to do that over and over again and we can't always find someone like that.

• 23:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 23:17Speaker 03

  So a lot of ideas fail because we can't find a team to lead it. Another criteria, we really want to make sure that other people besides us would invest. So this was the same thing with Blastoff, but it's true for many of our companies. If we could fund a company all the way ourselves, we could be deceiving ourselves by falling so in love with that child and no one else will participate with us. So we always want to find someone else to help us. And we found that when we find other people to partner with us, the odds of success go up. And we're looking at batting averages here of how to get the highest batting average. So take the most percentage chance of company actually succeeding. So we start very early on circulating the idea with people to see if they're excited about investing in it.

• 24:02Speaker 03

  And if we can't get investor enthusiasm, we start shifting and shaping the idea till we do, or we don't go forward with it.

• 24:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I remember you and I hitting the road to all of the large venture funds and trying to find that fit. Is it a movie production? Is it an educational platform? Is it a sponsorship? What's the business model for Blastoff that would get investors? And in 2002, there was no business model that would do it.

• 24:27Speaker 03

  No, definitely a lot of entrepreneurs get frustrated at how many meetings you have to have to sell your idea. But there's a few great things about it. One, you should take every one of those meetings as a way to get better and better at it. Meaning learn from each of those meetings. Learn what the objections are. Learn how your storytelling is working. You really want to make your idea sound inevitable. You actually want your idea to be inevitable, like for the success of it to be inevitable. To make it inevitable, a whole bunch of things have to happen, have to come into place to make that true. So learning how to tell the story to make it come across that way is very, very valuable. So as much as you don't like spending the time in those meetings, as much as you don't like getting a no, and you have to be willing to get a lot of no's to get a yes, it's very, very valuable to keep on pitching it.

• 25:09Speaker 03

  And then when you see the support from people, when people are leaning in, when people really like it. Then you really know you have something.

• 25:16Peter Diamandis?

  Let's for for reference, if you don't mind, you know, your top three to five moonshot ideas that that you're most excited about now or historically, what are they?

• 25:29Speaker 03

  Well, a moonshot idea that we had a long time ago, that was a wild success, was helping monetize the internet. It was a company called go to dot com.

• 25:35Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, I remember it well.

• 25:36Speaker 03

  And and that was nineteen ninety eight. So it was a long time ago, but it was a moonshot in the sense that it was trying to solve a very big problem of internet monetization. It also was a moonshot in the sense that at first people didn't like it, meaning it was objected to. And eventually it was actually people booed at it when I first showed it, like people actually hissed when I showed it on stage. It was at TED in nineteen ninety eight when I showed it. But we really felt that it was important. And sticking with something when people objected to something.

• 26:07Peter Diamandis?

  This was bidding on adwords.

• 26:08Speaker 03

  Yeah, bidding on keywords. So bidding on keywords in a search engine. This was a time when there were barely banner ads on the web.

• 26:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 26:13Speaker 03

  And certainly, the idea of having money involved in search was really repellent to some people.

• 26:17Peter Diamandis?

  Sure.

• 26:17Speaker 03

  But we really felt that was the way to lead to a more efficient market, where people wouldn't spam as much if they could actually bid on the things that were relevant to them. So we thought it was important. Turned out to be a very impactful company.

• 26:29Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it drove Google.

• 26:30Speaker 03

  Yep. We're really happy with the outcome of that.

• 26:32Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 26:32Speaker 03

  But then fast forward to today, almost all my work is on climate. So I'm really working on new ways to make green hydrogen, new ways to store energy. I think storing energy is the final frontier in the following sense. We now can get PV panels, solar panels, that are basically cheaper than windows. You can buy a piece of glass that's less than a window at Home Depot, that makes electricity.

• 26:55Peter Diamandis?

  That's amazing.

• 26:56Speaker 03

  And it makes electricity cheaper than any electrons have been made in all of human history. But the problem is, it's only when the sun is shining.

• 27:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 27:03Speaker 03

  So if we can now have storage that is cheap enough, batteries are too expensive still, but they're coming down. If we can make storage that's cheap enough, then we really can have renewable energy that scales. Because people want power when they want it. They don't want power only when the sun is shining or the wind is blowing.

• 27:15Peter Diamandis?

  How many energy companies do you have going now?

• 27:17Speaker 03

  We have almost twenty, and they've an overall category of climate mitigation of some form or another. And it's really, really important to me. I think it's, well, I think it's both important for the world, but it's a huge opportunity.

• 27:28Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, it was a direct correlation between the energy availability to community and its GDP and its health and its education level, everything.

• 27:36Speaker 03

  And look at what's happening with AI right now.

• 27:38Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 27:39Speaker 03

  The possibilities are endless.

• 27:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 27:42Speaker 03

  The ability to theoretically spin up a million brains to try and solve a problem, like a million PhD students you could spin up on servers, but that's gonna take a lot of energy.

• 27:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, one of the things I keep thinking about is when are we gonna see AI um come up with new physics? And new chemistry, that for me, you know, when it colors between the lines and interpolates, uh that's gonna be fascinating.

• 28:04Speaker 03

  I think it will. I think I think someone showed recently that AI was doing something that people thought it couldn't do. Prove geometry theorems, something which is beyond just taking some stuff and putting it back stochastically. Probability wise, so I think we're gonna see amazing things in the next five and 10 years.

• 28:22Peter Diamandis?

  I tell people.

• 28:23Speaker 03

  Maybe even the next year.

• 28:24Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, if you think it's moving fast now.

• 28:26Speaker 03

  Oh, oh, yeah.

• 28:26Peter Diamandis?

  We're standing still.

• 28:27Speaker 03

  I I've never seen anything move this fast. We think back to the internet rush. When I first started I D eleven nineteen ninety six, but basically with the browser in nineteen ninety three, Netscape's IPO in nineteen ninety five. Things were moving very fast. As you said, people running around the building here.

• 28:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 28:41Speaker 03

  But they were not moving as fast as AI is moving right now. And that's because it's living based on the back of Moore's law, exponentials, as you know, everything exponential.

• 28:50Peter Diamandis?

  Demonetized and democratized access to the most powerful technology in the planet, so entrepreneurs have won. Right? So, you know, I've been talking about this with with folks like we're gonna see one and three person unicorns, right?

• 29:03Speaker 03

  Yeah, and Sam Altman was talking about that recently too. He said, we're gonna see the first billion dollar one person company. And it, well, you've always talked about how you can really make an impact on the world when you could touch a billion people's lives or make a billion people's lives better. The chance to reach that many people now with something powerful is insane. Think back to Leonardo da Vinci. When he was in Milan and the reach of his brain could only be as far as his horse would take him. You know, if he could make it to Rome in a month or he could make it uh to Florence. Uh, but now our brain power is not only magnified by AI, but magnified in reach to eight billion people at an astonishing pace. So.

• 29:46Speaker 03

  Our our thoughts can really make a positive difference in the world.

• 29:49Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. Give me three of your energy moonshots right now.

• 29:54Speaker 03

  So one of them is continuum renewables, where we're working to store energy.

• 29:58Peter Diamandis?

  Continuum?

• 29:58Speaker 03

  Yep, continuum. And we really want to make very, very low cost renewable energy storage. And it's working with a company of ours called Energy Vault, already a public company.

• 30:08Peter Diamandis?

  Is using gravity as a storage device, which I love.

• 30:11Speaker 03

  Energy Vault is building buildings to lift up weights, store the energy. Continuum wants to use mountains, so to take existing hills where we don't have to build a structure.

• 30:20Peter Diamandis?

  Upslopes.

• 30:20Speaker 03

  Upslopes.

• 30:21Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 30:21Speaker 03

  So if you find a steep slope, it's almost no other way to make more cost effective storage than to take advantage of that.

• 30:27Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. This is steel on steel still?

• 30:28Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's, this is interesting. The only thing cheap enough to lift, to do gravity storage, is either water or dirt.

• 30:36Peter Diamandis?

  Okay.

• 30:36Speaker 03

  So anything more expensive than dirt is a little bit too expensive. We've come up with a way to compress dirt into blocks that you can lift up. Now, you need a steel cable to lift them up.

• 30:45Peter Diamandis?

  They're on, but on the, oh, it's.

• 30:47Speaker 03

  Yeah, it's a steel cable like a ski lift.

• 30:48Peter Diamandis?

  Okay, got it.

• 30:49Speaker 03

  Yeah. So you, so you have like a gondola lift that carries a forty ton block up the side of a mountain. That's really, really cost effective for storage. And I'm looking to scale that like crazy, both here in the US, but in the Middle East, in Australia, all around the world.

• 31:01Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing, amazing. Talk about physical image, that's incredible.

• 31:05Speaker 03

  It's almost like, it's embarrassing that it was so simple that we didn't come up with it sooner.

• 31:10Peter Diamandis?

  Right.

• 31:10Speaker 03

  But the reason is, again, necessity being the mother of invention, if you don't have cheap renewables, there's no reason for this.

• 31:16Peter Diamandis?

  No.

• 31:16Speaker 03

  But now that we have very, very cheap renewables, it's important.

• 31:20Peter Diamandis?

  What's another one?

• 31:20Speaker 03

  So H Genium is a company we have that is doing thermochemical hydrogen production. So right now, most of the hydrogen, green hydrogen that's made in the world, is made with electricity. But if you can make hydrogen with heat, it's even more efficient.

• 31:32Peter Diamandis?

  Now, is this the company that was using focused mirrors?

• 31:35Speaker 03

  It could, it could use that, but it could use any form of high intensity heat.

• 31:39Peter Diamandis?

  Okay. And I think if you get watered to a thousand degrees C.

• 31:42Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 31:43Peter Diamandis?

  It breaks down.

• 31:43Speaker 03

  You, you could do amazing things with high temperature and the right, the, the right methodology. This particular one is using a really clever invention from a professor at Caltech, Mark Davis. He patented it at Caltech, we spun it out, formed this company, and it's really, really exciting. Really, really think it can make a big difference.

• 31:59Peter Diamandis?

  And hydrogen, of course, is a storage medium. You know, people think it is a, is a, is an energy source, and it's, it's a way of storing energy.

• 32:05Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 32:05Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, what's another one?

• 32:07Speaker 03

  Oh, I have.

• 32:07Peter Diamandis?

  I know you. One more favorite, one more favorite child.

• 32:10Speaker 03

  Um, uh, we're looking at building a new way of making buildings.

• 32:16Speaker 03

  That both generate and store their own energy. So I want to make a building that could be a residential building. This is a new company we have called Energy Tower. That I'm working in partnership with the architecture firm SOM. Skidmore, Owens and Merrill out of Chicago. They have some great architects. And imagine a building that you could live in that both generates from solar onings and from storage, either gravity or other storage internally. Where if you live in this building, you're 100% renewable and there's no utility bill.

• 32:44Peter Diamandis?

  Nice.

• 32:45Speaker 03

  And I really think that could be a new way we build our structures to reduce the carbon intensity.

• 32:50Peter Diamandis?

  You know, some of the Abundance 360 members have been talking about, you know, new communities that are demonetizing everything, right? So, energy is effectively free. Education is free. Health is demonetized.

• 33:08Speaker 03

  That's a great mission.

• 33:09Peter Diamandis?

  Even transport is free so that you could live for hundreds of dollars a month and everything is made available.

• 33:17Speaker 03

  And energy is the backbone of all of that. If civilization has more cheap, green energy at large scale, everything will improve.

• 33:26Peter Diamandis?

  How cheap can it get? Where's it, you know, sort of asymptotically reach?

• 33:31Speaker 03

  Well, right now, there are large installations in the Middle East. I just got back from COP in December. They announced a large installation there where it was 1.4 cents a kilowatt hour.

• 33:42Peter Diamandis?

  For?

• 33:43Speaker 03

  For electricity.

• 33:43Peter Diamandis?

  Total. But including storage?

• 33:46Speaker 03

  Not including storage. So, it will get below one cent a kilowatt hour soon because of the large scale production of solar panels around the world. So my goal is to add storage to that for only a few cents more.

• 33:57Peter Diamandis?

  So three cents all in?

• 34:00Speaker 03

  If you can get to that, that will be cheaper than burning any fossil fuels for electricity. So, everybody wants to try and make the economy more electrified. Both on transportation, everything should be electrified.

• 34:12Speaker 03

  And if you have cheap electrons to power that, that would really be incredible. So be carbon-free and less expensive.

• 34:18Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, speaking about cheap electrons and making things cheap, I, I did a calculation last week, which, uh, I'll put out a blog on this shortly. If you could take yourself, let's call you 100 kilograms for round numbers and a spacesuit at 100 kilograms, and you could winch yourself up to, you know, an orbit of the space station, which is MGH, and then you could accelerate yourself to orbital velocity, which is one-half MV squared, and you could, I, I know, I did the numbers for seven cents a kilowatt hour all in, and you pulled it off the grid. Any idea what it would cost you for you and your spacesuit to go to orbit?

• 34:54Speaker 03

  No, how much?

• 34:55Peter Diamandis?

  Hundred and twenty bucks.

• 34:57Speaker 03

  That little?

• 34:57Peter Diamandis?

  Hundred and twenty bucks.

• 34:59Speaker 03

  Of energy?

• 34:59Peter Diamandis?

  Of energy.

• 35:00Speaker 03

  And that's a seven cents a kilowatt hour?

• 35:01Peter Diamandis?

  It's a seven cents, so.

• 35:02Speaker 03

  Yeah, even less if we could do it with renewable.

• 35:04Peter Diamandis?

  It's fascinating, right? It, it literally, um, it's the inefficiency of rockets.

• 35:09Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:09Peter Diamandis?

  That, uh.

• 35:10Speaker 03

  Well, we need, we need to make a space elevator, we need to do all kinds of things to try and make that more cost effective.

• 35:15Peter Diamandis?

  Interesting, interesting reference number.

• 35:17Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 35:18Peter Diamandis?

  Um, let's jump into your, to your DLD lessons, if we, if you don't mind. Uh, again, um, I think that there, and back up one, one slide here, so these are your first 12 ideas, right? This is what got Ideal Lab going?

• 35:35Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, the, the story of the starting of Ideal Lab was, I was running a company called Knowledge Adventure from 1991 to 1995 with my brother. And we sold that company in 1995, and the internet was taking off like crazy. And I brainstormed what ideas I wanted to start on the internet, and we had 25 different ideas. We narrowed it down to these 12, and I was trying to pick which one to start. And then I decided, I'm gonna find a way to do all 12. And that was the impetus for Ideal Lab. It was, let's make a place where we can have shared resources, a separate CEO for each one of these companies. I will put in the initial capital, I will support the companies with everything I've learned about entrepreneurship, and we'll find a way to try and make all 12 of these work.

• 36:20Speaker 03

  Well, it turned out, of this first batch of 12, we gave, we, it was a one-year experiment, actually, so it's 28 years now, but it was a one-year experiment. We raised three and a half million dollars to do a one-year experiment, a million dollars for operating expense, and $250,000 to put into each company.

• 36:35Speaker 03

  And of these 12, seven of them were able to get financing within the first year beyond the 250 that we put in. We made offers to people at the very beginning, very, very low salary offers, but high equity offers to try and take this money and make it last as far as it could. But after one year, seven of them raised additional financing, so five of them failed just by running out of money in one year. But three of them went on to go public.

• 36:55Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 36:56Speaker 03

  So that gave us funding to continue operating after that. So we ran for a second year. More companies succeeded, ran for a third year, and then here we are now, 28 years later, still doing it.

• 37:05Peter Diamandis?

  You know, there weren't that many venture studios or incubators back then.

• 37:10Speaker 03

  I don't know if there were any.

• 37:11Peter Diamandis?

  So probably the first.

• 37:13Speaker 03

  Maybe, maybe. It was the first I had heard of, for sure.

• 37:15Peter Diamandis?

  So do you call Idealab a venture studio? I mean, what category do you put it in?

• 37:21Speaker 03

  Yeah, really, we are a studio. It was a little bit. So Steven Spielberg was an investor in Knowledge Adventure. And I used to go brainstorm with him on product ideas for Knowledge Adventure during that period from 1991 to 1995. And I watched how he worked as a studio, where he'd have multiple movies in progress. He either would be an advisor, producer, or director of them. Some he would step in indirect. Most of them, he was actually producer or advisor, put the teams together to work on them. They came to him for advice along the way, the same way I wanted to be advisor to CEOs. I really wanted to emulate that. I wanted to be able to spread myself. So it was really, it was really fun. And he had a beautiful place over in Universal where I would watch how he would do that, because I'd have my meeting with him for half an hour, but I'd see the people came in waiting to go in right before.

• 38:04Peter Diamandis?

  Stacked up.

• 38:05Speaker 03

  And so I really think it's like a studio. Each of these companies is like a movie or a production.

• 38:11Peter Diamandis?

  And Idealab was a company that you capitalized yourself, brought outside investors.

• 38:18Speaker 03

  There were seven investors at the very beginning who each put in $500,000.

• 38:21Peter Diamandis?

  Like Howard Morgan?

• 38:22Speaker 03

  It was Howard Morgan for $500,000, Steven Spielberg, me, a bunch of people, each put it. Ben Rosen put in the first seven of us. And again, that was enough for one year, but then the company's success enabled us to continue.

• 38:34Peter Diamandis?

  And then the business model, just for folks to understand it, when you started a company, one of these companies, what was the economics there? You, I think, pretty standardized a quarter million as a capital infusion?

• 38:48Speaker 03

  At the beginning, it was a quarter million. Now, what we probably do is we spend 50 researching it at first before we start the company. Then we might spend another 150 to 250 before we decide to form the company. And then we might put in more money when we actually form the company, alongside someone else's $1 million.

• 39:03Peter Diamandis?

  And you know, I don't know if it was standard, but I, when we're doing blast off, it was 20% or thereabouts was for the employees and I think.

• 39:13Speaker 03

  Now it's closer to 50.

• 39:15Peter Diamandis?

  50%.

• 39:15Speaker 03

  Yep. Usually we want the, not usually, always.

• 39:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 39:20Speaker 03

  We want the team who's taking the company forward.

• 39:22Peter Diamandis?

  I should have negotiated harder.

• 39:23Speaker 03

  The, um, uh, the, the biggest lesson I learned along the way on this front was, I'm starting out trying to take my ideas forward, but it has to become the company's idea. It has to become the CEO's idea. Now in blast off's case, it did. It became yours. We, we handed it to you and we let you lead the company. There were other cases where I felt remiss that why is the CEO taking this company in a different direction than the way I envisioned originally? And then I learned, no, I have to let that happen. That has to be the case. The company has to be majority owned by the people who are running the company. So ideal app almost always becomes a minority shareholder very quickly. But we like that. We'd rather have a minority piece, but have the company succeed than try and have a larger owner state, ownership stake, but not have the motivation by the team.

• 40:08Peter Diamandis?

  And then in this building, uh, where you're incubating, incubating is, uh, you know, these really early stage, you have shared services.

• 40:17Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 40:17Peter Diamandis?

  Which is an amazing part.

• 40:19Speaker 03

  Yeah. So we have 25 people sort of in the back office that help the companies with marketing, finances, HR, yeah, we do their payroll, legal, we, we take care of all the.

• 40:30Peter Diamandis?

  All the stuff an entrepreneur doesn't want to know.

• 40:32Speaker 03

  Well, that was the inspiration. At, at Knowledge Adventure, when I was CEO, I was remembering that about 80% of my time was spent on things I didn't think were benefiting the product.

• 40:43Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 40:43Speaker 03

  And 20% of my time was spent with customers and looking at the product and thinking about that. I wanted to flip that. I wanted 80% of my time working on the exciting part and only 20%. So I tried to make ideal app solve that problem for CEOs.

• 40:54Peter Diamandis?

  Nice.

• 40:55Speaker 03

  Where when they come in, you don't have to worry about that stuff. Like I, when you were running blast off.

• 40:58Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 40:59Speaker 03

  We had bookkeeping taken care of for you. We had all the healthcare plans taken care of for you, option plans, all, all that stuff. We took care of, we took the rent, care of the rent, the building, all that stuff. And you.

• 41:08Peter Diamandis?

  And I was buying rockets.

• 41:09Speaker 03

  You were, you were off in Russia buying rockets.

• 41:11Peter Diamandis?

  Everybody, I want to take a short break from our episode. To talk about a company that's very important to me and could actually save your life or the life of someone that you love. The company is called Fountain Life. And it's a company I started years ago with Tony Robbins and a group of very talented physicians. You know, most of us don't actually know what's going on inside our body. We're all optimists. Until that day where you have a pain in your side, you go to the physician in the emergency room and they say, listen, I'm sorry to tell you this, but you have this stage three or four going on. And, you know, it didn't start that morning. It probably was a problem that's been going on for some time. But because we never look, we don't find out.

• 41:53Peter Diamandis?

  So what we built at Fountain Life was the world's most advanced diagnostic centers. We have four across the US today and we're building 20 around the world. These centers give you a full body MRI, a brain, a brain vasculature, an AI-enabled coronary CT looking for soft plaque, a DEXA scan, a GRAIL blood cancer test, a full executive blood workup. It's the most advanced workup you'll ever receive. 150 gigabytes of data that then go to our AIs and our physicians to find any disease at the very beginning when it's solvable. You're going to find out eventually. Might as well find out when you can take action. Fountain Life also has an entire side of therapeutics.

• 42:37Peter Diamandis?

  We look around the world for the most advanced therapeutics that can add 10, 20 healthy years to your life. And we provide them to you at our centers. So if this is of interest to you, please go and check it out. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. When Tony and I wrote our New York Times bestseller, Life Force, we had 30,000 people reached out to us for Fountain Life memberships. If you go to fountainlife.com/peter, we'll put you to the top of the list. Really, it's something that is, for me, one of the most important things I offer my entire family, the CEOs of my companies, my friends.

• 43:18Peter Diamandis?

  It's a chance to really add decades on to our healthy lifespans. Go to fountainlife.com/peter. It's one of the most important things I can offer to you as one of my listeners. All right, let's go back to our episode. If you're going back in time and were starting Ide Lab again. Would you do anything different? What have you learned in that 20-something years?

• 43:40Speaker 03

  Yeah, well, probably the biggest lesson I learned, we'll talk about making bold entries. I would probably focus on fewer, bigger-impact companies, which is what I do now. Now, it took me a while to learn that. I learned how hard it was to make every company succeed. So, it's better to make each effort bolder, more impactful, and do fewer of them.

• 44:00Peter Diamandis?

  Love it, love it. I want to talk about one more thing than jump at your lessons unless it's one of them, which is, it must be a challenge to get the right CEO.

• 44:11Speaker 03

  Oh, that's the biggest challenge.

• 44:13Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. It's more important than... well, we'll talk about timing.

• 44:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, no, it's more important than anything.

• 44:19Peter Diamandis?

  So, how do you find the CEOs? Are you constantly searching?

• 44:23Speaker 03

  Constantly searching.

• 44:24Peter Diamandis?

  You have... how big is your recruiting team here?

• 44:26Speaker 03

  So, we have a big recruiting team. We also work with recruiters, but I go to conferences, and whenever I see people that I'm excited about, I just start talking about ideas. When I see someone lean in, the way you did on Blastoff, we want to find someone who's going to sell their house.

• 44:38Peter Diamandis?

  In a day.

• 44:39Speaker 03

  So, we're looking for someone who, after I told them a bunch of ideas, calls me back sometime in the next week and says, "I can't sleep anymore, I'm thinking about that idea so much."

• 44:51Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 44:52Speaker 03

  And if that happens, but that takes a lot of... you have to take a lot of shots on goal to find... to make that happen. Because the odds of connecting with someone perfectly, the odds of them being at the right time in their life, the odds of them falling in love with my idea and then making it theirs. But now, we learn how...

• 45:07Peter Diamandis?

  Do you ever take...

• 45:08Speaker 03

  Let them make it theirs.

• 45:09Peter Diamandis?

  Does someone come to you and say, "I have this great idea, I'd love to incubate it at Idea Lab"?

• 45:13Speaker 03

  Usually, we don't do that.

• 45:14Peter Diamandis?

  Have you done it?

• 45:15Speaker 03

  We've done it a few times. Usually, if they come to us with a great idea, which is either very close or almost exactly the same as something we already wanted to do. And the reason is, I've already got 50 things I'm trying to do. I don't have the time to put into another one that is not one. So, people want that, and there should be a company to do that, but it's not us.

• 45:35Peter Diamandis?

  Right. Beautiful.

• 45:37Speaker 03

  But that's actually more what YC does.

• 45:38Peter Diamandis?

  Of course.

• 45:39Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, VCs and YC and other incubators take inbound ideas and then pick the ones they want to work on. We are more the other way. We have outbound ideas, and we pick the people who want to take them forward for us.

• 45:53Peter Diamandis?

  You have 4,150 ideas on the list.

• 45:56Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 45:57Peter Diamandis?

  All right, let's go on to the first here.

• 45:58Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 46:01Speaker 03

  The first lesson, of the most valuable ones I learned, was challenging the status quo, being bold. And we've talked about that already. And what I would say, we love this quote so much from Chopin, how we have it on the building when you walk in, that all truth passes through three stages. First, it's ridiculed, often ridiculed. Second, it's violently opposed. So when does the idea get opposed? When it starts getting some traction, and you start threatening some incumbents, your ideas often get opposed. And you have to make it through that stage. If you make it through those two stages, then your idea becomes self-evident, and then you've actually changed the world, because now you've made something happen that wasn't going to happen otherwise. Because if it was first ridiculed and then opposed, it means other people gave up. And if you make it happen. So I really love when we have a contrarian

• 46:45Speaker 03

  idea, that some people oppose, some people laugh at, but we have enough conviction that it's important that we carry forward. Go to is the example of that I told you then. But even the gravity storage that I'm working on now, there are a lot of people who think that's a crazy idea. Your quote, yeah, your quote comes up to me all the time.

• 47:02Peter Diamandis?

  If something is truly a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. And that's, you know, I took that from Bert Rehden.

• 47:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. I live that. And convincing people to follow you when it's still in the crazy idea phase is a challenge. But then when it becomes a breakthrough, people are like, oh, it always seems obvious to them after it's a breakthrough.

• 47:22Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, right. Success has many parents, failure has one. And that's one of the lessons I really want, you know, the entrepreneurs, I'll call them, much entrepreneurs, listening. The amount of work you need to do to take on a big, bold, meaningful effort, and just something to try and make money, a lot of times can be the same.

• 47:45Speaker 03

  It almost is always. Basically, anything is going to have a trough of despair in the middle. We'll get to that story later. Everything is going to be hard. Walt Disney had it hard. Steve Jobs had it hard. They've got fired, had to come back to his company. Walt Disney was practically broke when he was trying to make Disneyland happen.

• 48:03Peter Diamandis?

  I remember, he said, I owe $50 million, I must be rich.

• 48:09Speaker 03

  I didn't hear that one, but that's a great one. But it's gonna be hard. There's very, very few stories that are just purely up and to the right. You often hear it told that way mistakenly.

• 48:19Peter Diamandis?

  Exactly. And what you don't know, it was an overnight success after 11 years of hard work.

• 48:23Speaker 03

  Exactly. So, since it's gonna be hard, may as well do something bigger.

• 48:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 48:28Speaker 03

  May as well do something you really care about. Now, doing something you really care about, that's important, is valuable. Doesn't have to be so controversial. But making it be bold, so this is so good because making it be bold not only means you're making a bigger impact, but sometimes you actually have more success by being bold because you need to stand out anyway.

• 48:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 48:50Speaker 03

  So, it's almost like a few haters are okay. Because the boldness will win people over. Both recruits to your company, investors if you tell the story properly.

• 49:00Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 49:01Speaker 03

  But to make the bigger impact. So, I really feel...

• 49:04Peter Diamandis?

  I could not agree more. You know, it's why I named my own fund Bold Capital, just because, after my book. But one of the things I realized early on is when you have an idea,

• 49:18Peter Diamandis?

  and you've said this before, you know, the idea, the value, the amount of work coming up with the idea compared to the amount of work it takes to actually build a successful company.

• 49:28Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 49:28Peter Diamandis?

  Marginalizes to zero.

• 49:30Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 49:30Peter Diamandis?

  It's crazy.

• 49:31Speaker 03

  It's 1% or 99%.

• 49:33Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 49:33Speaker 03

  Not only is there 99% of the work after coming up with the idea, and that's why I often encourage people to, and people are often resistant about this, just start telling your idea to everybody.

• 49:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, don't keep it secret.

• 49:43Speaker 03

  Tell your idea to everybody.

• 49:44Peter Diamandis?

  Because people will tell you, "I've tried it, it failed, for these reasons, learn from them."

• 49:48Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So, you have to have a thick skin to take the criticism on it, but tell your idea to everybody. You don't have to worry about someone stealing your idea.

• 49:55Peter Diamandis?

  No one's stealing it.

• 49:56Speaker 03

  Now, you still should try to protect it in any way you can also, but you shouldn't worry about telling people. It's more valuable to tell people and get the lessons from that than to, than the risk. But definitely, it's 1% on the idea. The reason it's 99% after is not only all the hard work, but the iterations you're gonna make. You're gonna take a winding path, and we'll get to a slide on iteration in a moment. But your idea is not gonna be the same. When it sees the light of day, the great quote from Mike Tyson about everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. I never thought I'd be quoting Mike Tyson in a business situation, but it's totally true. Your business idea gets punched in the face metaphorically when you go out and bring it to the market, when you bring it to investors, when you bring it to customers. And that getting punched in the face is how you adjust your match,

• 50:41Speaker 03

  how you adapt.

• 50:43Peter Diamandis?

  And adaptability is everything.

• 50:45Speaker 03

  It's everything. So I wish there were a way, someone in an interview, you could just see their adaptability score right there. Like, if only you had a... Like, SATs don't tell you that. Great point average when you went to school doesn't tell you your adaptability. But adaptability is a very, very valuable thing.

• 51:00Peter Diamandis?

  It's what allowed mammals to survive over dinosaurs.

• 51:04Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 51:05Peter Diamandis?

  I liken an asteroid impact, you know, as exponential tech hitting the world right now, right? Everything's changing so fast that unless you're adaptable, you're not gonna make it. What's lesson number two?

• 51:17Speaker 03

  So I do have your quote in there. "Day before something's a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea." I have it right there in my deck. I just love that so much. But definitely, this is just reiterating this last point. Something that's just incremental is maybe straightforward, but not gonna be as rewarding, both psychologically and probably financially. But doing something like going from vacuum tubes to silica, that's a breakthrough. That's a big change, a step function that really can make the world different.

• 51:43Peter Diamandis?

  You know, the other thing which is true is when you have an idea, you gloss over the problems. And the closer you get, the more you see the blemishes and the issues that you have to overcome. And it's gonna be, no matter what you're doing. And so unless... What I... The terminology I use is unless it's related to your massive transformative purpose, right? What wakes up in the morning, keeps you going, captures your shower time.

• 52:07Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 52:08Peter Diamandis?

  You're gonna give up.

• 52:09Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 52:09Peter Diamandis?

  Because you don't care about it enough.

• 52:10Speaker 03

  Yeah. So, next lesson, use naysayers as rocket fuel. So, this quote from Coco after she won the US Open last year. This, I was practically getting goosebumps when I heard her say this.

• 52:22Peter Diamandis?

  Nice.

• 52:23Speaker 03

  She got up and the microphone mid-court and said, "I really want to thank the people who didn't believe in me. You weren't pouring water on my fire, you were giving me rocket fuel."

• 52:32Peter Diamandis?

  Love it.

• 52:33Speaker 03

  "And you're pouring fuel on my fire. And if you're gonna do something bold, you're gonna have naysayers."

• 52:39Peter Diamandis?

  Of course.

• 52:39Speaker 03

  So, you need to find a way to turn that into positive motivation and not be brought down by it. And I just love that, because I try to live that. But she said it so well. And I really got goosebumps when she said that.

• 52:53Peter Diamandis?

  I define expert as someone who can tell you exactly how it can't be done, right?

• 52:57Speaker 03

  So, I just love this, and I live that. I lived through the dot-com crash, you know.

• 53:02Peter Diamandis?

  I remember this, I remember this is a month before the dot-com crash.

• 53:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, people were making fun of us. People were saying, "Bill, you're crazy. Entrepreneurship is over, don't you understand? There's not gonna be entrepreneurship anymore." Like, people were actually saying...

• 53:17Peter Diamandis?

  I love that, is Enron overpriced?

• 53:20Speaker 03

  Yep. So, the arrows that were thrown at us, we had to persevere through it. And people were actually telling us, like, this graph of the rise of the NASDAQ and then the crash of it afterwards, people were saying, "You can't make companies anymore. No one wants those anymore." And we were saying, "Are you kidding me?" In fact, when we looked at this, if you looked at the internet usage, minutes spent, dollars spent, all that, the line was going straight up and to the right. The only thing that took a dip was valuations. So, the internet was real.

• 53:57Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 53:57Speaker 03

  This was not a fad that was going away. Yes, the valuations had gone skyrocketing relative to the relative usage, but everything continued going up and to the right, and it fully caught up with itself three or four years later. So, but those three or four years were tough to persist when no one wanted to talk about it. And I remember, we had to fund a lot of our companies exclusively ourselves, and that led to the lesson, which is, we shouldn't do that. We should really get partners. Even if we have enough money to fund them ourselves, we want to have people alongside of us. But it was hard, it was hard. But that's where I learned this lesson, to take the naysayers and use them as rocket fuel.

• 54:33Peter Diamandis?

  Love that.

• 54:34Speaker 03

  Yep. The next lesson, I gave a whole TED Talk about this.

• 54:38Peter Diamandis?

  And by the way, if you're listening to this and you haven't seen Bill's TED Talk on timing, I think it's about eight years ago.

• 54:45Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah, 2015, I think.

• 54:47Peter Diamandis?

  It's a fantastic TED Talk.

• 54:49Speaker 03

  Yeah, thanks. So this was a result of looking back at that time period at 20 years of companies and saying, really, what happened? Why did the ones succeed, succeed? Why did the ones fail? And there's many, many reasons. Of course, they all eventually fail because they run out of money. But why do they run out of money? They run out of money because the world isn't quite ready for what you have yet. And Last Office may be a perfect example. Now that had dot com implications and others. But the bandwidth wasn't there. The cameras weren't there. You know, so many things. We were trying to invent so many things outside of our area that weren't core to our core mission, literal mission in this case. But think about some other companies. Uber succeeded for many reasons. But Uber

• 55:32Speaker 03

  succeeded because GPS had just become available widely in phones.

• 55:36Peter Diamandis?

  iPhone had just come out.

• 55:37Speaker 03

  Yeah. If you try with a GPS in every unit.

• 55:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 55:40Speaker 03

  If you tried to make Uber two years earlier, it would not have made it. And Uber did not cause GPS to be available in everybody's pocket. Someone else did. Further, Uber succeeded really well because there was a big recession going on and they can recruit drivers very inexpensively because people needed extra money.

• 55:57Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 55:58Speaker 03

  That timing was perfect. Now, they didn't make that timing happen, but they got lucky. But what you can do to make your luck better on timing is look at the world and look at where people are and look what technologies are adopted. We had a company, one of our biggest lessons, we had a company called Z.com, which we started in 2000.

• 56:17Peter Diamandis?

  I remember that.

• 56:18Speaker 03

  And

• 56:19Peter Diamandis?

  I was here then.

• 56:20Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah. So here's what we were doing. We were looking at the success of the e-commerce companies we had in the 90s and saying, what's going to come online next? Entertainment. And we had the relationship with Steven Spielberg. So we wanted to start a company to bring entertainment online. Because of Steven Spielberg, we got introductions to Chris Rock and Adam Sandler. I met with them personally, gave them 10% equity in the company and a million dollars for exclusive content from them. We hired a great team from Disney. We had Mike Lang and Joe DiNunzio leading the effort. We hired 70 people in the studio over in Burbank. We started putting together this great content, but there was no broadband penetration. You couldn't even watch a video in your browser without downloading codecs and doing all kinds of weird stuff.

• 57:00Peter Diamandis?

  Plugins, yes.

• 57:01Speaker 03

  Yeah, plugins. So the company grew, grew, grew. Great stuff, great stuff. And went out of business in 2003. A year later, Flash comes out, and now you can at least watch a video in your browser. And a year later, we cross 50% broadband penetration and YouTube comes out.

• 57:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 57:16Speaker 03

  So we almost could have been YouTube if we had waited a little bit longer.

• 57:20Peter Diamandis?

  So one of the lessons I've learned, I'm curious about it in relation to this, is living long enough to live forever.

• 57:26Speaker 03

  Yes, that's very crucial.

• 57:27Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so for me, I had a... I missed a couple of these timing wise.

• 57:35Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 57:35Peter Diamandis?

  The last one I missed was Planetary Resources, an asteroid mining company.

• 57:39Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 57:39Peter Diamandis?

  And we had amazing team, and we were, you know, Chris Lewicki, who was part of Blastoff, was our chief engineer and then CEO. And SpaceX was launching. We had just passed the laws to allow private ownership of asteroidal material, which is a big deal to get those laws changed in the US and in Luxembourg. And these asteroids are multi-billion dollar to trillion dollar assets. But the timing, and I still think it's probably another five years out.

• 58:14Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 58:15Peter Diamandis?

  I'd love to take another shot at that.

• 58:17Speaker 03

  Well, what we always encourage our CEOs to do, sometimes they listen, sometimes they don't, sometimes it might not be right to listen, is take the money you have, spend it slowly so you last long enough. And Z.com, if we had taken the $10 million we raised and spent it at $2 million a year instead of $3 million a year, we might have been there.

• 58:34Peter Diamandis?

  Well, the other lesson here is building interim revenue engines, building interim products, right? So... You know, if you can, if as a company, you can start generating revenue and keep your and stretch your runway.

• 58:48Speaker 03

  Anything you could do to last long.

• 58:49Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, so you're really, at that point, intercepting good luck.

• 58:52Speaker 03

  Yeah, absolutely.

• 58:54Peter Diamandis?

  When you look at SpaceX, for example, SpaceX is exactly the story of the right timing, right? So Elon builds Falcon 1, failure, failure, failure, success on his fourth launch, which he had to borrow the money to make that happen. But what had just occurred was the spatial program was shut down.

• 59:14Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 59:15Peter Diamandis?

  And because the spatial program had been shut down, they put out a RFP for crew commercial vehicles, and he won that after his fourth launch was successful and got a billion dollar contract when he was, you know, in negative cash flow.

• 59:32Speaker 03

  Finding any way to stay alive until your market is ready for you. So by definition, if you're doing something bold and new, you're ahead of your time.

• 59:39Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 59:40Speaker 03

  So you need to catch up. You need to catch up to the right time. And by staying alive long enough, it's hard to do. It's really hard to do because you have to have the patience, you have to have the perseverance, you have to find these other revenue sources, you have to beg, borrow, and steal for money, you have to beg, borrow, and steal for customers, just to stay alive long enough.

• 59:58Peter Diamandis?

  So timing was number one. And again, the advice there is use your money wisely and start generating revenues as early as you can. Number two, team and execution.

• 1:00:07Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely. Finding the team, like we were talking about, who's passionate about it, who has the perseverance to fight through the tough times, who takes the arrows in the back and turns them into motivation, because you're going to have a lot of no's to make success. And again, the stories that you often hear sound up and to the right, but it never is that smooth along the way.

• 1:00:31Peter Diamandis?

  Yep, for sure.

• 1:00:32Speaker 03

  But the other thing that I most recommend about timing, I think now, is that you can't control timing, so just be honest about it. Like, be honest if the world is ready. I'll give you one other example from ours. Around 2001, I had an idea I was calling My Life. And My Life was going to be a bracelet that you wear that tracks all your vitals, that tries to predict cancer or other disease by looking at every signal we can and doing matching between post facto doctor visits and what signals we saw months earlier.

• 1:01:04Speaker 03

  People came to me and said, "I'm not gonna wear something all the time that monitor signals, are you crazy? It's too privacy." And now, look, we all have something on our... Everybody accepts that now. We were just far too ahead of the mentality of people willing to do that. Of course, 10 years later, Fitbit came out, and then that gradually wore people down. And now, if you sold something, they could save people's lives, and all they had to do was wear something. They'd say, "Of course, no problem."

• 1:01:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:26Speaker 03

  So, you could be... So, that company failed in around 2002. We couldn't find any investors to participate, and we didn't really go forward with it. But being honest about the feedback you're getting on would people really accept what you're doing is very important.

• 1:01:40Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, that is true. Not deceiving yourself.

• 1:01:42Speaker 03

  Yep, yep, exactly. So, these are just a bunch of different companies where the timing was good, timing wasn't as good. This was, I was actually talking about, again, how PV panels are now so cheap. Now, cheap.

• 1:01:53Peter Diamandis?

  Four times cheaper for a PV panel than a window.

• 1:01:55Speaker 03

  Than a window, right, right. So, you could buy a window with a frame that does nothing except let light in, and that costs $417, and you could buy a PV panel the same size that costs $109, and it makes electricity. So, that... Well, this is another lesson from you, from exponential. When you have a learning curve to drive down the cost, you get exponential cost reductions over time. As you make things in exponentially large volume, it almost follows Moore's Law kind of effect. So, there are very few... We don't make windows at the scale we make PV panels.

• 1:02:25Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 1:02:26Speaker 03

  Of the same size, of the same format. So, it really is incredible. But I was talking about how AI feels like the internet in 1995, but faster, even faster.

• 1:02:36Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, I've thought about this. Bill Gross must be having a heyday on idea generation.

• 1:02:42Speaker 03

  I would be, I would have a heyday on it, except I weren't so focused on climate.

• 1:02:46Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:02:46Speaker 03

  So, I still have AI ideas, and I do them, but not one a week like I could be. Okay, lesson number four. Iterate like crazy.

• 1:02:55Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 1:02:56Speaker 03

  I definitely feel, we talked about it earlier, it's not your initial idea, it's how you respond to the market.

• 1:03:02Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:03:03Speaker 03

  And you really need to be listening to customers, listening to feedback, adjusting things along the way, and I actually think you win on iteration, how fast you can learn per time.

• 1:03:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, agility.

• 1:03:13Speaker 03

  Yeah, really, really matters.

• 1:03:14Peter Diamandis?

  And running experiments, and actually aggressively running experiments. I remember one of my favorite quotes from Jeff Bezos is, "Our success at Amazon is a function of the number of experiments we run per year, per month, per week, and per day."

• 1:03:27Speaker 03

  Totally, yeah, yeah. So, so I joke, I should have called it iterate lab, not ideal lab, because iteration is more important than the idea, but ideal lab sounds better, but iterate is what you really have to do. And, and back to the Jeff Bezos quote, I call it learning per time, turns on knowledge. Every time, if you're a startup, you're competing against a big company, probably, some incumbent somewhere, whether it's Google, whether it's uh, price waterhouse, you know, whatever, yeah, whoever you're competing with, they're, they're better funded, they have more people, they have more brand. What do you have? You have agility. That's the one thing you can-

• 1:04:01Peter Diamandis?

  You have willingness to fail.

• 1:04:02Speaker 03

  Both those.

• 1:04:03Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah. I mean, one of the biggest challenges I see is the large corporations, and this is also, this is also true of the wealthiest individuals, are afraid of doing anything that makes them look foolish and failing, right? And it's like, I celebrate those entrepreneurs like yourself, like Elon Musk, that are willing to like, just bet it all over and over and over again. And individuals who are hoarding their cash, it's like, you know, you still can't take it with you. I mean, do something, change the world for God's sakes.

• 1:04:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. Well, on, on the willingness to fail, I wanted ideal lab to be a safe place for people to do experiments like that. And no matter how much you say, we want people to do that, people watch what really happens. And if they see anybody ever lose their job by taking a chance, then they won't do it.

• 1:04:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:04:52Speaker 03

  So, one of the structures of ideal app that we put in place to mitigate that was if a company fails, or if a person makes an idea in a company that fails, one, we celebrate the learning, but two, if that company actually goes out of business, we try and take the best people and just re- put them in a new company. So, we really want to make it safe. We, we, we really want to make it safe for people to take chances. And the only way they'll, they'll really feel that safety is if they see that they are safe.

• 1:05:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:17Speaker 03

  Not, not, not the words you use, but the actuality of what happens.

• 1:05:18Peter Diamandis?

  Agreed. And this sounds very much like Astro Teller at, at Google X, right? I asked Astro one day, why are you so secretive? Um, at X? And his answer, his answer surprised me. He said, I want you to imagine the rate at which our companies fail here. And if the- Jose Mercury News, whatever it's called, was announcing Google fails another company, another company.

• 1:05:41Speaker 03

  Right, right.

• 1:05:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:42Speaker 03

  But that, that, you said, you said another important advantage that a startup has over a big company. A big company has a reputation to protect. And they can't announce those failures.

• 1:05:51Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:05:52Speaker 03

  And they can't announce them, they might leak out, so they just don't take them, they don't take the chances. And may, maybe even the Google versus OpenAI example of recent is, is one example of Google sort of inventing that, that technology.

• 1:06:04Peter Diamandis?

  And for years before.

• 1:06:05Speaker 03

  Years before.

• 1:06:05Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:06Speaker 03

  But, but it's a little too risky for them to release something that could damage Google's reputation. But for another startup, who has nothing to lose.

• 1:06:12Peter Diamandis?

  The other example here is YouTube and Google Videos.

• 1:06:16Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:06:16Peter Diamandis?

  Right, so Google Videos preceded YouTube by some time.

• 1:06:19Speaker 03

  Oh, is that true? I didn't know that.

• 1:06:20Peter Diamandis?

  And, and YouTube started going up and to the right because Google's lawyers.

• 1:06:24Speaker 03

  Oh, exactly.

• 1:06:25Peter Diamandis?

  Were like, you can't put that on, you can't put that on. And so when Chad Hurley was allowing anybody to put any videos on there, their user adoption was so high, you know, Larry and Sergey had no other option but to buy them.

• 1:06:36Speaker 03

  Yeah, that's a, that's a perfect example. But, but that's why a startup has to take advantage of that.

• 1:06:41Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:41Speaker 03

  If you, if you have that advantage, you gotta use it because that's almost the only advantage you have, compared to all the other great advantages that a big company has.

• 1:06:47Peter Diamandis?

  That's so true.

• 1:06:48Speaker 03

  Yep. Uh, so next one, create a remarkable offering. So this is a little bit related to being bold. But, uh, this great quote from Robert Stevens.

• 1:06:56Peter Diamandis?

  Hmm.

• 1:06:57Speaker 03

  Uh, who did Geek Squad at, at, uh, uh, Best Buy.

• 1:07:02Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, yes.

• 1:07:02Speaker 03

  Uh, uh, is, is marketing is a tax on being unremarkable. And I, I love it because it really says.

• 1:07:08Peter Diamandis?

  It's true.

• 1:07:09Speaker 03

  If, if you have to spend money to convince people about your product, that's the marketing dollars you have to spend. But if you just make your offering incredible in the first place, that is your marketing.

• 1:07:19Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:07:19Speaker 03

  And I always, I love this because I'm always trying to, whenever I'm pitching an idea, I want the idea to stand out and sound incredible. But coming up with the right way to make your offer stand out is really, really important. And it could be anything. I don't know if you remember, when Google first launched Gmail, I think they launched it on April Fool's Day, in a given year, when they offered you a gigabyte of free email. And that sounded like such a crazy offer, they made it sound like it was a April Fool's. Fake, but it was real. And they made an offer and it sounded so exciting that people were rushing to go try it out. And I think you need to try and do that with everything. Now, of course, giving a gigabyte of email now costs nothing because storage is so cheap and and now they have advertising to cover it.

• 1:08:03Speaker 03

  But but the the now it's a business too. You can buy the business version of Gmail.

• 1:08:08Speaker 03

  But coming up with a way that your offering sounds irresistible to people is very important. Again, especially if you're startup. You have limited funds, you have limited budget, you have limited way to stand out. Making your offering.

• 1:08:18Peter Diamandis?

  Signal above the noise. Do you have any good examples from your recent companies that you that you love?

• 1:08:23Speaker 03

  I I like going out and offering. We came up with an idea of offering. Whatever your cost is for energy. We'll do a deal with you that's just 10% less. Just show us your bill and we'll charge you 10% less. So that way it's a no risk. You're going to save money in the first month. That would be an example of remarkable offering. Just coming up with anything that makes it so obvious for people to just say, wow, that's too hard to pass up.

• 1:08:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yes, irresistible offer.

• 1:08:49Speaker 03

  Yep. Uh, next is being success sensitive. So we talked about this. You asked about how much equity we give out early early on and I learned that it's so hard to make a company work. And you so badly want every one of them to work. That forget about dilution. Just do whatever it takes to make the thing successful.

• 1:09:08Peter Diamandis?

  The ratio of something to nothing is infinite.

• 1:09:10Speaker 03

  So so so give out the equity liberally. Make sure everybody wins. Make sure investors get a good deal. Make sure employees have a good deal. Make sure everyone is aligned. When you have alignment, you have more success and to be so worried about each point of equity, which is hard to give up as as an entrepreneur. But I I learned.

• 1:09:29Peter Diamandis?

  I could not agree more. The times that I have been, I have failed on a couple of occasions when I drove the valuation up too fast.

• 1:09:38Speaker 03

  Yes, yes.

• 1:09:39Peter Diamandis?

  And then you inevitably stubble because you're doing something big and bold. It's hard. And then if you're doing down round, so.

• 1:09:47Speaker 03

  It's very intoxicating to drive the valuation up, but it's also dangerous.

• 1:09:50Peter Diamandis?

  It is dangerous.

• 1:09:51Speaker 03

  It's dangerous. And I learned that lesson and I I really try and convince CEOs. They sometimes CEOs get this offer, someone wants to offer them a little bit more money or a little bit lower valuation and they're they're grinding themselves about whether they should take it. And I say, just take it. Just if that person is going to help you be successful, just do it.

• 1:10:09Peter Diamandis?

  When's the best time to raise money? Right now.

• 1:10:11Speaker 03

  Right, right. So getting great alignment between everybody is really, really important.

• 1:10:15Peter Diamandis?

  Beautiful. That is maturity, by the way.

• 1:10:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:10:19Peter Diamandis?

  That comes with maturity and experience and it's wisdom is.

• 1:10:23Speaker 03

  Yeah, definitely learned that one the hard way, but but very valuable.

• 1:10:26Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:27Speaker 03

  Building a complimentary team. Um, definitely I learned it took me till I was thirty five years old to learn this one. I wish I learned this one when I was in in college. Uh, I was hiring people like me.

• 1:10:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:38Speaker 03

  I was looking for people like you, like my brother, like other people to surround myself with people with the same view as me, but to be successful in a company, you need a whole range of people. And this this chart is a good example of it. If this is, if this chart is time on the X axis and success on the Y axis. The entrepreneur, the E type person starts the company. You, that's the only person who can start a company. It's the person with the who's a dreamer, person who's got the idea. So the company goes up and to the right for a little while. But if the entrepreneur can't get anything done, can't finish, can't ship a product or can't get, then the company will eventually fail. Now, just because you're an entrepreneur, it doesn't mean you can't finish something. Like you and I both know how to, we know how to graduate college, we know how to get our papers done, we know, uh, and we know how to build something.

• 1:11:19Speaker 03

  But you eventually have to bring the P or producer skill into the company next. And the P skill is the ability to finish the product, ship the product, get in customers' hands, get a customer to buy it, raise the money, pay the bills. So the P skill is necessary in a company too, but even that will only carry you so far. Eventually, if you only have E and P skill in the company, you'll fail as well. Now you need some A skill. So what's the A skill? That's the skill that I have none of, not only do I have none of, I'm negative, I'm negative, yeah, yeah. A is chief of staff, A is the administration, A is the, is the.

• 1:11:51Peter Diamandis?

  Operations.

• 1:11:51Speaker 03

  Uh, all the operations. It's opening the bank account, it's paying the bills on time, it's making the payroll, it's getting people's healthcare plans set up, it's all.

• 1:11:58Peter Diamandis?

  It's the stuff we have no, no patience for.

• 1:12:00Speaker 03

  Well, it's something you and I have no patience for, but there's some people who who, that's what's incredible. There's people who, not only have patience for it, they love that. But I didn't understand that. I didn't, I I so thought that everybody hates that. I couldn't understand there were people who actually love that and I wanted to find someone like that to compliment me.

• 1:12:17Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:12:17Speaker 03

  And I finally learned that. But then even further than the A, and you need the A, so the A, the A is the person who sort of makes the trains run on time, makes everything work together. But even beyond. On that, you'll still fail because all those three personality types, they sort of hate each other's guts. The A doesn't like the P. The P is demanding and is a bull in a china shop. The P wants to make sales and it feels like the A is holding them back. The E wants to invent new things and it feels like the P and the A are holding them back. So you need I. The I is the integrator or the skill that can bring those people together and solve conflict. Now again, it doesn't have to be a separate person. It usually is.

• 1:12:51Peter Diamandis?

  Well, they soon be an AI that's doing a number of these things.

• 1:12:53Speaker 03

  Exactly, exactly. So you need to find these other skills. For me, I didn't even know those existed.

• 1:12:59Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:00Speaker 03

  Let alone could I get along with them. But once I learned that there were wonderful eyes that could help me match with Ps and As, it was fantastic. And it's still hard. Like even me describing this makes it sound like I'm good at this. It's still hard.

• 1:13:16Peter Diamandis?

  The people part of the equation is still the hardest part and the most important.

• 1:13:21Speaker 03

  Yeah. But if you can get all those skills in harmony, you have an unstoppable company. When you have these, all these in harmony, you have an advantage culturally over another company that doesn't like that. This is where culture can beat another company. So you could win a company with IP, better business model, better capitalization, better marketing and all that, but you can also win with better culture. Cause if you have all these people in harmony, you really are unstoppable. You can do things that other people can't touch.

• 1:13:47Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing.

• 1:13:47Speaker 03

  So that's the complementary team.

• 1:13:51Speaker 03

  Be a personal growth learning machine. We talked about this a little bit earlier, but this is about getting feedback, improving yourself, learning new things, learning new skills, like me, learning that there's a A, me learning that there's an I type person. But I heard this one statement once.

• 1:14:09Speaker 03

  Closing the gap. Sometimes I see people who I admire and I say, how could I be like that? Like they're exhibiting some skills that I don't know how to do that. Rather than thinking about the big leap between me and them, I think about, let me just close the gap a little bit. Let me just try and close the gap between me and that skill a little bit each week or each month. Let me just get a little closer. It was a way of me thinking about it being not so big of a chasm that I had to cross to get there.

• 1:14:34Peter Diamandis?

  Got it.

• 1:14:35Speaker 03

  And what little skills could I pick up that will make me a little bit better at the things that I'm lacking right now?

• 1:14:40Peter Diamandis?

  I mean, there is a school of thought that says if you're excellent in skills A, B, and C, and don't have D, E, and F, double down on A, B, and C.

• 1:14:50Speaker 03

  Absolutely. But I agree with that.

• 1:14:53Peter Diamandis?

  Right.

• 1:14:53Speaker 03

  But if there are skills D, E, and F that are pulling you down, that are negating you, that are hurting your other skills, you could find a way to minimize that. And that's an example of closing the gap for me, so.

• 1:15:07Peter Diamandis?

  And do you do this with a mentor? Do you do this by reading? How do you do this?

• 1:15:11Speaker 03

  Mentor, coach, reading, and feedback. And understanding, well, asking for feedback, learning how to take feedback and accept it, learning how it's not personal but beneficial, having people you trust to give you feedback that's valuable.

• 1:15:25Peter Diamandis?

  One of my favorite sayings, I was in conversation at a Goldman Sachs event with Elon, and he said, "You know, my friends tell me what's great, my best friends tell me what sucks."

• 1:15:34Speaker 03

  Yeah. Yeah. So you really need some best friends.

• 1:15:36Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:36Speaker 03

  Some best friends to tell you what sucks and to just make some impact on closing the gap. Not eliminating it completely, it's too hard. You're not going to change yourself, and you don't want to eliminate the strengths. But finding a way to make it as an incremental improvement to be a little bit better.

• 1:15:52Peter Diamandis?

  Did you see the movie Oppenheimer? If you did, did you know that besides building the atomic bomb at Los Alamos National Labs, that they spent billions on biodefense weapons? The ability to accurately detect viruses and microbes by reading their RNA? Well, a company called Viome exclusively licensed the technology from Los Alamos Labs to build a platform that can measure your microbiome and the RNA in your blood. Now, Viome has a product that I've personally used for years called Full Body Intelligence, which collects a few drops of your blood, spit, and stool, and can tell you so much about your health. They've tested over 700,000 individuals and used their AI models to deliver members critical health guidance,

• 1:16:37Peter Diamandis?

  like what foods you should eat, what foods you shouldn't eat, as well as your supplements and probiotics, your biological age, and other deep health insights. And the results of their recommendations are nothing short of stellar. You know, as reported in the American Journal of Lifestyle Medicine, after just six months of following Viome's recommendations, Members reported the following: a 36% reduction in depression, a 40% reduction in anxiety, a 30% reduction in diabetes, and a 48% reduction in IBS. Listen, I've been using Viome for three years. I know that my oral and gut health is one of my highest priorities. Best of all, Viome is affordable, which is part of my mission to democratize health.

• 1:17:21Peter Diamandis?

  If you want to join me on this journey, go to viome.com/peter. I've asked Naveen Jain, a friend of mine who's the founder and CEO of Viome, to give my listeners a special discount. You'll find it at viome.com/peter.

• 1:17:35Speaker 03

  Number nine, assess your commitment. We talked about this earlier. This is, do you wake up, and I told you about recruiting CEOs, do you wake up and say, "I can't sleep over this idea, it's too important to me." So I taught a class in entrepreneurship at Caltech this last term. It's the first time I've ever done that.

• 1:17:49Peter Diamandis?

  How big was the class?

• 1:17:50Speaker 03

  It was 31 students.

• 1:17:51Peter Diamandis?

  I would have loved to have been in your class.

• 1:17:53Speaker 03

  We filmed it, I'm gonna try and get it online. But it was really, really, way harder than I thought, but way more rewarding than I thought. It was really fun. And I taught them about these kinds of things, and I helped them create business plans, take their ideas forward, and then we're having a business plan competition that we funded so that they can get some awards to try and take their ideas forward. And when I was having them come up with 10 ideas, they're saying, "10 ideas? I'm not as good at ideas as you are, Bill." I said, "Just come up with 10 ideas. They don't even have to be ideas. Just even come up with 10 problem statements, meaning things in the world that you wish were better." Like, "I hate traffic on the 405, and I wish there was a way I could..." Anything. Just come up with something that you don't like, that you wish were different. That's an idea, as far as I'm concerned.

• 1:18:36Speaker 03

  So everybody in the class came up with 10 ideas. Then I said, "Now..." That was homework assignment number one. "Next homework assignment, you're gonna pare them down." So how are you gonna pare them down? "I'm gonna give you a spreadsheet with 16 columns in it. You're gonna pick any 10 of those columns and give a score." So one column is, "What's the size of the market?" One column is, "Are you capable of doing this?" "How hard would it be to recruit people to do it?" "How good would the margins be in this business?" And on and on and on. And you pick any of the columns you want, but I just want you to fill up a spreadsheet, a 10-by-10 matrix, just so you can figure out which of these you're gonna take forward for your business plan in this class. And one of the columns is, how committed to you are this idea? Would you spend a week on it, a month, a year? How long would you spend on it?

• 1:19:18Speaker 03

  So two people in the class came back on that column and said, "I would spend the rest of my life on this." I said, "You spend the rest of your life on this?" "Oh yeah, I care about this so deeply." "Well, that's your idea. Forget the other nine columns. You don't have to worry about anything else." That's the criteria. So if you could assess your commitment to something and decide, "I care about this so much that I'll go to the end of the earth for it." That's the way you should decide.

• 1:19:42Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, I could not agree more. You know, in the parlance of what I write and teach, I call that your massive transformative purpose.

• 1:19:51Speaker 03

  Yeah, exactly, exactly. And this is just my way of saying that same thing. But using a "how long would I be willing to commit to this?" As a filter for your life, for your ideas, is a really great one.

• 1:20:01Peter Diamandis?

  And so I think a lot of entrepreneurs don't realize it takes a decade.

• 1:20:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:20:07Peter Diamandis?

  It takes at least a decade. You know, point at any company. You know, people don't realize SpaceX is, you know, God, 20-plus years old right now, right?

• 1:20:18Speaker 03

  Yeah, it does, it does take a long time. It takes, but it does take that long.

• 1:20:22Peter Diamandis?

  And you just, you don't know about it during its formative ages, its formative years.

• 1:20:26Speaker 03

  Yeah, so you really have to be committed. So I'm committed to this climate work that I'm doing right now.

• 1:20:32Peter Diamandis?

  It also happens to be the biggest business opportunity on the planet.

• 1:20:35Speaker 03

  Well, it has a few things. It's the biggest business opportunity. It matches my skill. I'm a mechanical engineer and I love doing things like that. So I'm choosing mechanical-related things in the climate. But also, I'll work on it for the rest of my life. So it's exactly me, it's that criteria. I didn't even think about it that way. But it was really resonating with me when these two young women said that about their ideas in this class, about being important criteria. And then finally be persistent. So this, this graph is so great. Every idea you start out with, like with Blastoff that we talked about earlier, but every idea I started out with, it's always, "This is the best idea ever." That's, you wouldn't start it if you didn't feel that. But then after you get into it, you start learning there are challenges. There are roadblocks, there are things. It's harder than I thought.

• 1:21:16Peter Diamandis?

  Reality sets in.

• 1:21:18Speaker 03

  Reality sets in. And my biggest learning over the last 20 years. 5 years over the last 50 years is that that just happens like that is a fact of life. That's part of the story. That's part of the journey. And in fact, climbing out that dark swamp of despair, that is the thing. Like, that is the skill that makes the difference between succeeding and not.

• 1:21:37Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, it's the persistence. You know, for me, I remember, I mean, with X Prize, launched it in, came up with the idea in 94, launched it in 96. And then you've got the Columbia accident, you've got, you know, 2000, you know, meltdown in 2001. And people, and people were, people literally calling me saying, give up. It's never going to happen. You're never going to get it funded. My other, my Zero G Corporation, have you flown with us?

• 1:22:05Speaker 03

  No, I haven't.

• 1:22:05Peter Diamandis?

  Oh, good. You have to come and fly.

• 1:22:08Speaker 03

  But I remember. Howard has done it multiple times.

• 1:22:10Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah, he's enjoyed it. We, I remember coming up with the business model and being so naive.

• 1:22:18Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:22:19Peter Diamandis?

  So naive about what it costs to operate 727 and do this and get through the FAA on this. And of course, my, my favorite example was going into the FAA so confident with all my engineering done that we were going to be able to fly because NASA has been flowing people and flying people in weightless parabola flights. And the, the associate administrators who I had in the room look at me and go, you can't do this. It, it, it doesn't allow this. You're not allowed to take people out of their seatbelts.

• 1:22:49Speaker 03

  Okay, but Peter, you have the nay, say or gene built into you.

• 1:22:52Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:22:53Speaker 03

  When people tell you that, it makes you want to do it even more.

• 1:22:56Peter Diamandis?

  I told, I said, listen, you're either going to retire or die before I give up.

• 1:23:01Speaker 03

  Right. Well, so entrepreneurs who have been successful have automatically made it through this. But if you want to bring new entrepreneurs in and they're young.

• 1:23:11Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:12Speaker 03

  Or they haven't experienced this yet, to teach them that this is going to happen is eye opening. Because they so often hear stories of up and to the right where there is no swamp of despair in the middle. So making people understand that that's part of it. And, and in fact, I think this is not true only of entrepreneurship. I, here on the top, it says. Emotional journey of creating anything great. This is the emotional journey of graduating from college, of writing a book, of doing a play, of anything that you want to do that is an important thing.

• 1:23:41Peter Diamandis?

  And in fact, you don't appreciate it unless you go through something like that.

• 1:23:45Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:23:45Peter Diamandis?

  If it's given to you.

• 1:23:46Speaker 03

  Exactly.

• 1:23:47Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:23:47Speaker 03

  So I really, I really end on this and the only thing I add to that is this try again, which was a great lesson I learned from Reid Hoffman. So I'm at a lean startup conference and Reid Hoffman is presenting and he talks about how LinkedIn was his third social network. He had two failed social networks before that. I didn't know that either. And each one, he learned something that made him want to try again. And he was willing to try again because he felt, oh, now I know how to do this a little bit better. So if you fail at something and you don't learn anything new and you don't know a new way to do it, I don't recommend trying again. But if you failed at something and you learned something and you say, ah. So for example, the Z.com, which we learned our mistake of being too early.

• 1:24:30Speaker 03

  If I had known that back in 2004, 2005, I could have tried again. It's not appropriate to try again now, it's too late. But this lesson I took away to think of each of these things as at bats. Where you go at bat, if a baseball player goes up at bat and they strike out, they don't give up, they don't never play baseball again. They look at the tape, they ask their, their coach about, what was that last pitch? What did I miss about the signal? What did I do? Was my swing too? And, and you go up at bat again, you go try again. And the idea of taking a company even that had failed and doing that same idea again, but with new knowledge, didn't really resonate with me until I heard Reid Hoffman say it. And, and now I really even feel that.

• 1:25:12Peter Diamandis?

  I've done that twice before. One with International Space University, then Singularity University and learning from the first business model failure and creating it again. And then with Human Longevity and Fountain Life. How about yourself? Have you?

• 1:25:27Speaker 03

  Yeah.

• 1:25:27Peter Diamandis?

  Have you done that?

• 1:25:27Speaker 03

  Yeah, so, so I, I did different solar companies that I learned from, different storage companies that I learned from. And again, sometimes you miss the timing and now it's too late to try it again. But sometimes you learn something and now The timing is right. So one example, I did an energy storage company in two thousand thirteen. That didn't work out, but that's because solar energy wasn't cheaper than fossil fuel at that time. So I knew it was gonna happen, but now ten years later, twenty thirteen, twenty twenty three. Now, all of a sudden, PV prices came down, not by my doing, by China's doing, by Germany investing in subsidies. And other things happened in the world that I couldn't make happen. I was hoping they would happen. They took ten years. Like you said, everything takes ten years. It took ten years for PV prices to come down to be competitive with fossil fuels.

• 1:26:12Speaker 03

  But that that happened as an externality that now makes going back and focusing on storage valuable.

• 1:26:17Peter Diamandis?

  Amazing. You know, Bill, to to to close us out here.

• 1:26:25Peter Diamandis?

  I typically say, you know, entrepreneurship is is the greatest joy. It is. I I love it. I love the art of starting a company. You know, I'm on twenty seventh now, not under fifty, but.

• 1:26:38Speaker 03

  That's incredible, twenty seven.

• 1:26:40Peter Diamandis?

  Anyway, it's it's it's joyful.

• 1:26:45Peter Diamandis?

  You know, what are your your thoughts to the entrepreneur who's on the verge of taking that taking that risk?

• 1:26:53Speaker 03

  Well, I would say it's one of the most rewarding things of all time. It's a great thing for personal growth. It's a great thing for bonding with other people. My my children were in the school play in high school. I never was. And I saw the bonding and camaraderie that they had working on something together and the celebration they had when the play was done. And and I thought, God, I really missed out on that life. And I realized, no, I didn't. I did it with entrepreneurship.

• 1:27:16Peter Diamandis?

  Yes.

• 1:27:17Speaker 03

  I I make I make my own way of of having celebration with a team. So it's a wonderful way to bond with other people, change the world, make the world a better place. And I would say, over the course of my career, it's gotten easier in the sense that. People understand entrepreneurship. There's way more investors available to do this now. There's way more openness. Entrepreneurship is celebrated in a way that it wasn't. When I graduated from college, I was hiring some people after I graduated from Caltech. I had to take their parents to dinner to convince them I wasn't some pariah. Because they had offers at JPL and aerospace companies. And here I was getting them to come to a little startup. Like, what are you doing to my child? Uh, uh, but now that doesn't happen anymore.

• 1:27:57Peter Diamandis?

  And I think, you know, we're around the same age for when we were in high school into college. You know, it was Wall Street.

• 1:28:04Speaker 03

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:28:05Peter Diamandis?

  Was the, the, the place to be.

• 1:28:06Speaker 03

  Yeah, you would graduate, you go get a safe job at a big business.

• 1:28:09Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:10Speaker 03

  And the, the idea now, the other thing that's really great for entrepreneurship, especially in the United States and especially in California, but everywhere in the United States, is people who have a failure, that can almost be a badge of honor.

• 1:28:23Peter Diamandis?

  And it's, you've learned.

• 1:28:24Speaker 03

  Yes.

• 1:28:25Peter Diamandis?

  Yeah.

• 1:28:25Speaker 03

  So I think there are some cultures that don't, that, that treat it a little bit more like a scarlet letter as opposed to a badge of honor. But here, if you've learned something from your entrepreneurship, you can go do anything still, even if it doesn't work out. So the combination of the impact it can have, the camaraderie, the, the joy, the learning, and then the upside, of course, the upside is pretty incredible, too. I mean, having an ownership stake in a company, I, I said it before, but I'll say it again. It unlocks human potential. If you've ever gone into a business where the owner is behind the counter, or a hired hand is behind the counter, you know the difference about when someone feels like they're an owner, about how great the service can be, about how, how powerful the, the feeling of ownership is. So I love the idea of giving people significant ownership in a company and seeing what happens.

• 1:29:10Speaker 03

  It's really exciting.

• 1:29:12Peter Diamandis?

  Bill, thank you for all that you've done. Thank you for sharing your lessons from the heart, your wisdom.

• 1:29:18Speaker 03

  Oh, thank you. I'm, I'm honored to be able to do it and I, you can tell I totally believe in this and I, I hope this can help other people be successful.

• 1:29:25Peter Diamandis?

  I know it can. Um, check out Bill on the web, just Google Bill Gross and the lessons you've, you've been putting out amazing content. Um, idealab.com.

• 1:29:36Speaker 03

  Yep.

• 1:29:37Peter Diamandis?

  Uh, anyplace else that we should send folks?

• 1:29:38Speaker 03

  Just, just there and at YouTube, you'll see, you'll see everything.

• 1:29:41Peter Diamandis?

  Awesome.

• 1:29:41Speaker 03

  Great.

• 1:29:42Peter Diamandis?

  Thank you, Bill.

• 1:29:42Speaker 03

  All right, thanks.

• 1:29:54Speaker 07

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