Hi. I'm Tim O'Reilly. I'm the founder and CEO of O'Reilly Media. I'm a conference producer
and book publisher and I've been involved in a number of the revolutions in technology
in Silicon Valley. I was -- I created the first commercial website
back in 1993, first ad-supported site. I organized the meeting where the term "open source software"
was adopted by a collection of free software leaders. And I sort of popularized the term
"Web 2.0," when everybody was down in the dumps after the dot com bust.
And right now I'm involved in promoting this new revolution that's happening at the intersection
of sensors and robotics and smart manufacturing called the Maker Movement.
We had an event in San Mateo this last spring that drew 80,000 people playing with stuff."
Smart stuff and dumb stuff made with smart tools. John Markov said it was the closest
thing he'd seen since the West Coast Computer Fair which started the personal computer revolution.
And I'm here to tell you that innovation does not begin with entrepreneurs. It begins with
people having fun. And that doesn't mean that you can't make
money, that you can't figure out how to get a profit.
What it does mean is that the innovation engine has a number cylinders and they have to fire
in the right order. If you go after the money first, your engine
misfires. So when you think about it, you know, the
Wright Brothers, they didn't want to build an airline; they wanted to fly!
You know, when those guys got together the Homebrew Computer Club, they had no idea -- maybe
a couple of them did. I don't know about Bill Gates and Steve Jobs. But so many of them,
they just wanted to have a computer for their own.
When we were first playing with the World Wide Web, it was just because it was so cool.
And after while, you get a sense of the possibility of what excites you, and then you start thinking
about changing the world and you start having a really big idea.
You know, a computer on every desk and in every home.
Or access to all the world's information. Or the end of malaria.
These are big ideas. You want to change the world.
That's the second cylinder of the engine. Because when you have a really big vision,
it keeps you on track. It lets you try things. Because you know that you're trying to go
somewhere. The third cylinder is where the entrepreneur
comes in. That's when you realize that you actually have to have a business model, you
have to have customers, you have to figure out how to get other people to help you build
your vision, and you start to build that team, that company.
But it doesn't start there. And then the fourth -- and I think in many
ways, the most important -- cylinder in this engine -- and I'm sorry, it's just a four-cylinder
engine; maybe somebody has an eight- or twelve-cylinder -- is the idea that you create more value
than you capture for yourself. One of the things that has gone very, very
wrong in our economy is that we have company after company that is trying to take more
out of the system than they create. Innovation is about creating value, and what
you see in great companies is that they built a platform that builds value for others.
If you look at the personal computer or the World Wide Web or what's happening now on
smartphones, you know, the money isn't being made by one company. It's being made by an
ecosystem. And the people who build those platforms are,
in fact, creating and nurturing that ecosystem. They're creating way more value than they
capture. This is also one of my passions. I'm trying
to teach government how to think like a platform provider.
Now, right now we have this government model that's a little bit like a vending machine.
We pay in our taxes and we get out services and the government thinks they've got to,
you know, fill the vending machine. And instead, if you look at the great government successes
like the Internet or like the GPS system, it's building some kind of platform capability
that society then expands on, uses the platform and creates value. So I like to say that Ronald
Reagan is the father of Foursquare because it was in 1983 that it was a U.S. airliner
that strayed into North Korean airspace and was shot down and he said, "Whoa. When this
GPS thing you Air Force guys are working on is finished, please, you know, let's open
it up for civilian use." Didn't happen for another 17 years, but eventually
it happened. And, you know, we've seen the explosion of
location-based services as a result. So this idea of platforms and of creating
more value than you capture for yourself is so central.
And so I urge all of you, in your thinking about the companies that you build, look for
excitement, look for fun, and then you will start to find things that really matter. Because
what -- we are all hungry for meaning, and the things that do excite us and that fill
us with joy are usually things that have big impact.
And so you follow that -- that joy, that bliss. You try to create value for the world. And
then you build business as a natural outcome of what you started.