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>> Right now, I think there's a lot of hero worship around entrepreneurs and
there are a lot of stories in the press that it make it seem easy.
That make it just seem like you could wear flip-flops and a hoodie and
walk around in Palo Alto and poof, you're an entrepreneur.
And in fact, those that have built these high scale businesses,
there is a ton of blood, sweat, tears and years of time involved there.
I decided to go out and interview people, the people behind
businesses to determine how they were able to create and scale companies.
The data sets, the largest right now in the United States on founders that goes 0
to 100 million in revenue, with five years of history,
not more than ten years to go to scale.
And it's a data set that looks across industries and across geographies in US.
What I came back with is an extremely accessible, learnable, teachable code
of six skills that basically mean that anyone can create and scale a new idea.
And I think that's really important to realize it's a fundamental human ability
to create something.
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One really important tool,
that's available to every single person is to ask questions.
If you want to spot something, you have to be curious.
And so there is some research that shows that a five year old will ask about 100
questions a day.
But as people age, and as we go through a traditional education system and
believe we're experts.
At some point in time, in our work, in our careers, we ask less, and less, and
less in terms of questions about the world around us.
So if you want to spot a gap, one thing you just have to be curious,
you have to scratch the itch of curiosity.
Under Armour founder Kevin Plank is a great example.
So he solves his own problem, he is known in the University of Maryland,
where he played football, as Maryland's sweatiest player, okay?
So he was not a good athlete and
he weighed his cotton T shirt that he was wearing under his uniform, it weighed
three pounds at the end of a practice because it had so much water weight.
And that was not a good thing for Kevin.
So the gap he sees in the marketplace is no one is making under armor,
making better undershirts for football players.
And he goes to a local fabric store in College Park, Maryland.
He buys this stretchy bolt of fabric.
He takes it to a local tailor.
$450 and seven prototypes later he has his original Under Armour synthetic shirt.
And then the original product, many people don't know, didn't work.
It was worn under red uniforms and made all of the football players pink
because they had a scavenger kind of fabric that was making the color of
the dyes go on the white undershirts so he tried again and again.
Kevin is really funny about saying you have to solve your own problem and
look in places, in his case, the football players wouldn't normally be looking to
armor up the big, tough athletes.
So you just have to look for gaps all around you,
be alert, ask questions, and solve problems.
And pretty soon you find out that a lot of other people have similar problem,
in many cases.
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There's some research around if you are committed to a goal and
you focus on what's in front of you, what's left to go,
you're two to three times more likely to complete that goal.
And so in the entrepreneurial economy, that's very important.
If you, instead,
think of the ground you've covered to date thinking, you will slow down.
So this is some important brain research, cognitive focus research,
that if you think what's ahead of me your brain will throw focus, motivation, and
concentration towards achieving that.
And this is about driving for daylight always forward.
Airbnb is a great example, so those are three founders, Kevin, Brian and Joe.
And they continue to believe very much in the idea
that people would share their homes, the air bed and breakfast.
The air bed that they had actually on the floor of their own apartment,
that they hosted other designers.
They are Rhode Islands School of Designers originally and one tech founder.
They did this experiments for themselves to make their own rent.
They had a note under their door that said your rent's up 25% in San Fransisco.
San Francisco's very expensive city and they couldn't afford it.
And then there was a conference at the same time in San Francisco and
other designers coming for that conference.
They hosted three people.
They believed very much this would happen and no one else did.
This is a very typical entrepreneurial story of having everyone else pass,
because the idea is out on the fringe.
It's out on the margin, but if you are driving for daylight,
you believe in the horizon that you want to conquer.
And in this case, the Airbnb founders launched, and relaunched, and launched.
At one point they went to South by Southwest and launched, as Twitter had.
Believing that they would have a Twitter moment.
Only three people used the service, and
they were two of the three, as the founders.
So they kept driving for daylight, and
built what is now valued almost at a 30 billion in valuation startup.
So it's one of the world's great startup stories.
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OODA stands for observe orient decide act.
This is a framework that came from The US Air Force originally.
And very few people realize that while The United States has had supreme
airpower in the world, we have not had the best equipment.
So the Russian Mig could fly higher and faster than an F-15 or
a 16-E, these are our fighter air craft.
The reason why US pilots could win in every dog fight in a really tough
competition is that they would observe, orient, decide, and act faster.
Move through the traditions faster.
This is called getting inside of an opponent's loop, learning loop,
so you learn faster.
You, in fact, change the dynamics of a fight.
If you have observed, oriented, made a decision and taken an action, a competitor
is responding to something that a split second before has been changed.
So in the business world, this is every bit as dynamic and important a force.
Because if you can outmaneuver a competitor, even by a split second, and
make a decision and stay ahead, you can win in a very competitive,
globally linked, technology accelerated economy.
A great example here is PayPal.
And many people know this example because they had six different business models
in 18 months, that is moving very rapidly through decisions and decisions cycle.
Reid Hoffman who was there in the early team, basically they were getting
a law suit by visa saying you are acting as a credit card company.
And Reed went to negotiate that on behalf of PayPal.
And the larger credit card company would not drop the lawsuit, but
instead, reconvinced them to study the problem for a year.
Okay, never study a problem, by the way, because while that large credit
card company was studying the problem the PayPal team moved through, again,
multiple decisions.
They merged two companies, they ended up going public, selling to Ebay.
The much more interesting thing is that they go on, this founding team,
to start LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, Slide,
Tesla Motors, Digg, Yammer, which recently sold to Microsoft.
The first investment behind Facebook, etc.
So they go and seed the entire next wave, basically, of the Internet.
And when you spend time with the original team and ask what is it,
how did you do that?
What they will say is, the first thing is just not going to be it.
You have to observe what works and what doesn't.
It's going to be counterintuitive.
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Before you start a project, you actually want to build in some failure.
Think of that as testing and think of that as learning and
think of that as pushing the innovation edge on whatever you're doing.
If you have a perfect record,
you probably aren't building something the world hasn't seen.
You already have a road map, you already know how to do it.
The speed with which the world is changing, means that you
can't have a perfect record, but you can be smart about failing.
So the idea here is to fail wisely, and all failure is not the same, by the way.
If you fail wisely, one thing to do is set a ratio and
say one in three things I try won't work and that's what I want.
Jessica Herrin is a great example.
She's the cofounder of weddingchannel.com, originally, and
now Stella and Dot which is a fabulous, fast growing online retail company
supporting women has a whole workforce of direct sales with women stylists.
And Jess will say one in three things that she tries won't work.
And that's what she wants.
There's her ratio and what she wants the stylist to tell her is very,
very quickly, love it or lose it.
Love this piece of jewelery, love this handbag in the inventory line, move it at
volume, lose it this doesn't work, for whatever reason it doesn't even matter.
Just lose it as quickly as possible and that's called failing wisely.
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The ability to network minds is the ability to harness the brainpower of other
people.
And to pull bright minds towards you to help build solutions.
And this is really based on the idea of cognitive diversity.
So the world right now, we're talking a lot about diversity that you can see on
the outside, gender, race, social economic differences.
My research is showing that really what matters is what's inside your mind.
Two people who look very different, if they're trained exactly by the same
institutions in the same manner can think the same.
So the idea here is to tap into different points of view and
encourage the cognitive diversity in your work,
in your workplace, to unlock solutions.
In order to take an MRI, you have to be inside the machine,
it's very claustrophobic, it's very loud and cold.
You have to be there by yourself, no one can be with you.
You have to be completely still.
And so for children this is extremely difficult.
80% of kids have to be sedated to take an MRI scan.
And that ups the medical cost and it certainly ups the risk.
So for the designer of this beautiful technology,
he felt very much like a failure, the most vulnerable people,
children, were not able to handle the scan very well.
So his response to this is very beautiful in that he goes and networks minds.
And he gets together a lot of the GE design team.
And lab techs and doctors and nurses and
then many children and daycare providers and a designers of children art
museum exhibits that are very large things that kids would interact with.
And this availability to a network minds produces the adventure series now for
the GE MRI machine and there are seven adventures the kids go on.
So if you see this machine it's all painted,
it has decals, there's music playing.
There's a story when the children go to the hospital, they meet a camp counselor,
not a nurse, that person is all dressed up.
They're told a story, in one case that it's a pirate story, it will be loud,
they will have to be quiet, it will be cold.
All of these things make it an adventure now for kids,and that largely comes from
listening to children in the networking minds, in this case, of the customer.
And we often discount kids in designing things or in the business world.
We don't actually take into account that point of view.
So and it's an example of how GE has done an amazing job at networking minds.
And now the sedation rate in the adventure series for
kids seven different adventures is nearly zero.
So it's the exact same technology, a completely different outcome.
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Gifting small goods is about the exchange of small favors, small kindnesses,
something of value that you can do for someone else for a colleague.
And it's a five minute favor.
So this is the idea that you don't have to throw yourself off of a train for
someone else.
You do, however, need to figure out little ways that you can be helpful.
So a small good would be forwarding a resume, writing a few lines of code,
critiquing a proposal, giving feedback, opening an opportunity for someone.
These are five minute favors, they're not big, heavy lift things to do.
And the interesting part about the transparent world, and
the speed of communication now is that people will know about this.
This used to be the right thing to help out a colleague.
Now it makes you a lot more productive.
There is a real generosity and kindred spirit among people who've built things,
I believe, because they know how hard it is.
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