원문 보기
good afternoon we live in wildly disruptive times I'm going to share with you seven crucial lessons for navigating these times first let me talk to you about some of the disruptions that I've lived through and that we're living through right now when I first saw each of these Technologies I knew the world would never be the same the world of work and life would never be the same right when I graduated from Caltech in 1981 it was the exact month the IBM PC came out I went down to computer land in Pasadena bought my $5,000 machine with one floppy drive and 250 K of ram but it was so remarkable it was mindboggling what that computer could do and it really did change the world and we all live through the PC Revolution then a few years later the spreadsheet came out Lotus 123 came out Lotus became the first public unicorn it was an amazing amazing product I remember when I first saw what Dan brickland and Bob frankson had done where you could have formulas in cells that would recalculate even as you sorted them my mind was blown again and I thought work was going to change dramatically and it did then when Netscape came out and you could navigate everywhere again the world changed for me it led to me forming ideal lab and starting companies like crazy because I saw so much opportunity when you could connect with the planet the way Netscape allowed you to do and then of course the mobile Revolution with the iPhone and when you could have all your music in your pocket a browse in your pocket navigate and communicate with the world well the two most recent disruptions that I feel are as big as that are when PV solar panels became cheaper than fossil fuel in 2018 and November of 2022 when chat GPT came out I remember the smile on my face when I first saw what chat GPT could do and I thought this is going to change the world forever and I believe it will I believe maybe it even already has I want to talk about these changes and then what lessons I've learned from 50 years of Entrepreneurship that appli to this disruptive change so first PV becoming cheaper than fossil fuel for the first time in history you could make electricity cheaper than burning things that had never happened before that turning point was 2018 from all the investment that happened in PV panels all the learning curve all the cost reductions you finally could make electricity cheaper than burning something and really it's remarkable that with the complexity of a power plant and all the engineering that goes into it the cheapest way to make electrons today is to point a piece of glass at the sun it's just remarkable what we've done to make that possible and now when you can point the piece of glass at the Sun that piece of glass is very very inexpensive because of the scale at which we're making it so take a look at this a window at Home Depot cost $417 the same size PV panel cost 1/4 of that $109 the one on the left just lets the light through the one on the right makes electricity so it's just unbelievable what we've done with technological scale so that's one revolution that I think is just so powerful and it's needed badly because we are burning a lot of stuff and putting a lot of CO2 in the sky every one of us in this room makes about one pound of trash per day but not very well known that each one of us makes about 31 pounds of CO2 trash that we put up in the sky 31 times as much stuff into the sky as to what we put in the the waste basket and that has done unbelievable things it's 100,000 cubic meters from each of us every single day if CO2 was more visible we might have done something more more about it sooner but it's invisible so we don't really realize it but we're sticking all of that trash up into the thin layer of our atmosphere and just to give you a sense of how much we're putting up there I tried to make the numbers that are so staggeringly large 40 gigatons a year manageable the Pyramid of Giza weighs 6 million tons all of Humanity on Earth is putting a pyramid of Giza into the sky every hour a pyramid of Giza of CO2 every hour for the last 50 years there's half a million pyramids of gas floating around the Earth in weight of CO2 that's what we've done to the planet and that's why the extra heat we're adding to the Earth is warming the planet the extra heat we're adding to the Earth from that layer of CO2 is the equivalent of three Hiroshima bombs going off every single second so it's unbelievable what we need to do to fix that but at the same time there's a disruptive opportunity energy is the biggest industry on Earth we have a chance to to change things this is a graph of the GDP versus over over time over the last 800 years per capita you can see it's flat flat flat flat flat then it takes off like crazy once we learn how to burn things once we learn how to make cheap energy so if we can make that cheap energy renewable we have a huge opportunity to remake the entire energy industry and energy is 10% of the entire Global GDP the entire Global GDP is1 trillion dollar energy is 10 trillion so that means we can build 10 trillion dollars of new businesses every year to take advantage of solving this problem so that's one big problem one big disruption something we need to do something about the other one chat GPT November 2022 this has been worked on for a long time people have been working on a AI for a very long time but I say November was this turning point when the whole world saw what actually could be possible it's a huge turning point and it's because of this there's always huge disruptive change when the cost of something approaches zero so with the internet the cost of distribution approach zero you can reach the whole planet with the cloud the cost of storage approach zero so you could make so so much larger things movies and images and so many things you could share when the cost of storage approach zero with generative AI the cost of content is approaching zero the cost of content creation the cost of knowledge so new things are going to happen that are just extraordinary because as that price goes to zero it's just absolutely unbelievable and we've seen what happens Nvidia just in the last year their revenues from their data centers have gone up by a factor of five five times increase in revenues two decades ago in was 100 times smaller than Intel today its market cap is 10 times larger than Intel it's unbelievable what has happened because this demand for AI has made these chips so valuable in fact when Nvidia delivers their chips to Cisco they go in an armored vehicle because the chips are now so valuable these chips are like brains that are going to power our future Humanity so it's so so powerful to make these at scale and to make them available at scale but the applications going to come up with this are just unbelievable so nfx had a really great report that said AI is like water it'll be like water like electricity ubiquitous it'll be everywhere so coming up with sustainable differentiation is going to be hard that's why I'm going to share some of these lessons with you about how to make that sustainable differentiation it really really is incredible how it's going to be embedded in everything it's not going to be something we talk about just like we don't talk about the internet being behind everything anymore this is a great chart from Roy bahat from Bloomberg beta he broke down different Innovations in AI into three categories now some ACT Innovations of AI could use all three of them but he broke them down into these three categories looms which are things that could automate a person's work slide rules which make a person better or cranes which extend what a person can do enabling something to lift something they couldn't have even lifted before we're seeing all of these new types of applications being built on top of AI and that's where the whole great Frontier is going to be just a few weeks ago Sora announced this new capability of building a video you saw lots of examples of that this is one example of this woman walking down the street in Tokyo I met with this woman Mish on the lower corner here she used to be the CMO of Microsoft I I had dinner with her the night that this came out and we were talking about it and she said if she wanted to make this video at Microsoft she would have had to get Talent she would have had to clear the street she would have had to get the camera crew she would had to get the scripting written it would have cost $2 million and now this cost 20 bucks at a couple minutes at a prompt and you can make this so this is crazy crazy disruptive and then just this morning Alibaba announced a new thing called emo where you can take a picture of someone and have them actually sing anything to it so there was DiCaprio singing Eminem there was this woman right here they actually took the face of this woman singing dualipa it's incredible and it wasn't uncanny it was actually it was uncanny how good it was it wasn't in the uncanny valley of unbelievable so we're going to see so many disruptive things happen to Hollywood of course and there's all kinds of copyright issues around this too but again lots of room for Innovation Sam Alman was positing that we might have the first oneperson unicorn company well with the distribution of the internet it allowed companies to build to be a billion billion dollar company because they could impact a billion people because of that power of reaching so many people on the planet think back to Leonardo da Vinci Leonard D Vinci comes up with a great idea in Florence and the total reach of his idea is how far he could go on a horse he could get to Rome he could get to Milan that was his total reach that radius with the internet the reach became the whole planet all of a sudden we saw this explosive impact that you could make with an idea with your brain well with AI it's not just your brain it's how many brain resources you can now spit up so I think we're going to see things where you can spin up a million phds to solve a problem now humans will come up with the problems we'll look at the things that Humanity needs to solve but we'll be able to spin up brains to solve them in a way that was never before possible so we're moving from not only large language models but to large action models large video models and much much more so we're going to see a lot of innovation around this okay so that with that backdrop on those two innovations two disruptive Innovations with lowcost solar energy and with AI that's going to change so many things how do we smartly participate in these disruptions so I'm going to share with you seven lessons that I've come up with from 50 years of starting companies so over the last 50 years I've probably written down 5,000 different ideas for companies we've turned 150 of them into companies 50 of them have successful IPOs and Acquisitions 40 of them are still operating but that means we've had 60 failures so I learned a lot from those failures I want to try and extract some useful lessons from those that might be beneficial not only to you LPS but also to your companies to your portfolio companies and so on and I'd be really happy if some of them are beneficial so these are the seven biggest lessons I'm going to go through each of them with about one minute so let me take you through each one of them the very first one challenge the status quo be bold it is so important with an idea to stand out you heard earlier today to be contrarian to do something distinctive and different when I look back at ideas that we tried that weren't bold enough those had a much much lower success rate so really really standing out matters a lot the problem is all great truth passes through three stages according to this great quote by Arthur schopenhauer first it's ridiculed second it's violently opposed because once you start getting subraction some incumbents start getting worried and third it's accepted as being self-evident so if you're going to do something bold you have to fight to get through all three of those stages but when you do when you make something self-evident you make something happen that would not have come into being before so it's really really valuable so first thing be bold but if you're going to be bold the day before something is a breakthrough it's a crazy idea this is a great quote from Bert Ran So if the day before something is a breakthrough it's a crazy idea you're going to get a lot of arrows in your back you're going to have a lot of naysayers so that's my second one use naysayers as Rocket Fuel so this is a picture of Coco Gaff after she won the US Open and she gave a quote on court when she was interviewed afterwards that gave me goosebumps when I heard her say it which was to those of you who who were naysayers to me you didn't believe in me you thought you were putting water on my fire but you're actually putting fuel on it so a very important thing when you're doing something bold and different you need to try and take those naysayers and hours in your back and turn them into fuel very very hard to do but very very important to do now I had to live through that I live through the crash for example um this cover of Fortune uh had me smiling I just lost $800 million in 8 months why am I still smiling well it was a really very tough time uh I was still smiling though because I saw the following thing the market went up like crazy and went down like crazy but when you have conviction and you believe in what you're doing you can power through it even though there's lots of naysayers there were people telling me entrepreneurship is over bill you should just just give up but I saw the following thing look at that orange line I saw the utility of the internet going up I saw the usage going up I saw every single Trend going upward the only thing going downward were valuations so I knew it was worthwhile to continue the demand for this product the demand for this service the demand for the opportunity was only going to grow I had to try and take those naysayers and turn them into Rocket Fuel very important thing next lesson find great timing well I gave a whole Ted talk about this particular item but it's very very important to look and see is the world really ready for what you have you can make something great and be ahead of your time by definition you're going to be ahead of your time if you're trying to make a breakthrough but you really have to look to see if everything's in place to make your idea succeed we heard earlier today about Uber taking off right when GPS was on enough iPhones to make it possible if you had tried Uber earlier albe it a great idea it wouldn't have made it so many different ideas we talked about web van earlier today and then instacart later made it work so timing really really matters and you have to be honest about it so this first company of ours is one example of successful timing goto.com was the first pay-per-click keyword search engine it was at the right time search engine quality was going down search engines needed monetization internet needed a better way to track the paper performance this took off like crazy company went public we sold the patents to Google the company eventually got acquired by Yahoo really perfect timing bad timing next company Evolution robotics I started this company in 2000 when I saw Wi-Fi taking off digital cameras taking off I said oh home robots are going to really really be a thing right away way way too early I was way off in fact it hasn't even happened today 24 years later we pivoted the company we went went at to floor cleaning we sold the company I Robot we did okay but my vision for a a general purpose home robot still has not happened the world really wasn't ready forward yet all the other things that had to happen to make people accept that that just wasn't there yet another company we had that was good timing digital cameras were taking off we saw that digital camera software was really bad but the digital camera adoption curve was on the S curve on the very very steep rise part so we made a company called Picassa to manage your digital photos this company was acquired by Google and became Google photos this was time right because the market was really ready for it it's very very hard to do I talk about this like it's easy it's not I don't get it right most of the time but it's very very important to really look at it very carefully your portfolio company your fund anything you're doing is the world really ready for what you're doing at that moment because that's really going to be an obstacle it's really really hard to get over next one iterate like crazy startups have almost every disadvantage compared to incumbents they're smaller they have less money they have less brand they have fewer people everything but the one thing they can do is iterate faster action produces information and it's really important to just keep on learning before I started ideal lab I was in packaged good software and Dell had come out with computers that was crushing Compact and HP because they had more turns on inventory and my new model after we started ideal lab was turns on knowledge how can we have more turns on knowledge faster how can we learn faster in the competition that's one thing a startup and a fund and everybody can do it's turns on knowledge that matter in the world today I think that's really the one of the most important lessons I learned from starting so many different companies create a remarkable offering it's so hard to stand out you need to make your offering stand out I talked earlier about being bold but you also this great quote marketing is a tax on being unremarkable that means you're gonna have to pay lots of money to convince people to use your product if you don't have a remarkable offering on every Dimension and that could be the price the distribution method the functionality anything but it's really really important to be absolutely remarkable I'm going to go through the last few very quickly assess your commitment I recently taught a class on entrepreneurship at Caltech it's the first time I ever did that it was way harder than I thought but it was way way more rewarding than I could have imagined there were 31 people in the class undergraduates and graduate students I had them each come up with 10 ideas they couldn't all come up with 10 ideas but I said even just a problem statement just something that you think should be better in the world then I had them rank them on a whole bunch of different criteria and one criteria that we threw in is how committed are you to it would you work on this for a week for a quarter for a year how long two people came back after that uh observation and said I would work on this for the rest of my life I said well that's the one you're choosing that's the idea you need to choose if you're that committed that really is what matters for making an idea work and I think commitment matters so much and you'll see how that applies to this last one be persistent so the emotional journey of creating anything great is really really hard and almost always has a dark swamp of Despair in the middle it starts off all great you think this is all fantastic and then all the problems start happening and then the dark swamp of Despair occurs so if you have that commitment you can power through that dark swamp of Despair to come and rise out on the other side and really make something a success so I think that commit commment and persistent ties together including with try again I learned this from Reed Hoffman I learned at a at a Lean Startup conference once that Reed Hoffman LinkedIn was his third social network he failed at two social networks before starting LinkedIn but he learned something from each one that gave him a new idea for something to try so if you learn something new from a failure it's very very valuable to still try again and that's something I never would have done before I I had heard that from Reed that he had actually tried three times so it's almost like taking another at bat after you've tried something and it didn't work out so we're witnessing probably the two biggest revolutions ever it's bigger than the PC Revolution it's bigger than the Industrial Revolution bigger than the mobile Revolution these two revolutions the clean tech Revolution and the AI Revolution are unbelievable it's really the best time in history for changing the world I really hope that some of these ideas are helpful to you I'm so grateful to so many of you in the audience so many of you in this audience have helped me in one way or another either invested me directly or indirectly through one of your funds so I'm really really thankful you've given me such a great ride in this industry to make a chance make a difference and I'm really really thankful thank you very much you been a great audience
Comments 0