today on the show I have a great pleasure to welcome last villain hi alas how are you doing I'm doing fine thank you and and thank you for pronouncing my second name right because you speak Danish and I am Danish yeah tell it stands yeah yeah so last you have an impressive background your Chief investment officer you're an entrepreneur and you are a best-selling author you co-founded what certain companies and the past 30 years and written 17 books I think that is correct and number 18 coming out in April so you have a background as an engineer and to study also business that's great Bachelor of business and then I had some education also in financial trading I understand you like skiing that's strange for a Dane isn't that I don't know I don't think it has been strange for a day in my lifetime but when I was young we used to go mainly to San Ranson and I had this dream that one day I would actually be able to ski a lot more and at that time I had no idea I would end up in Switzerland but that was something I'm really happy about why are you doing the interview from I'm in web right now enjoying the never-ending Sun we have here I know you have your 18th book coming out soon so what are the big trends in technology and which impact could they have in our world there's a very big meter Trend that has been going on especially since the 1980s which I Define as the beginning of the Precision economy so just to put this term into perspective first we had the military economy where GDP per capita didn't really grow then we got the industrial era and then a Precision economy started around 1980 and you see that in many statistics where the consumption of most Commodities is just a decoupled from GDP for instance if you look at the American economy you can see that GDP per capita kept Rising through the 1980s until today but the consumption of water fertilizer industrial materials and so on flatlined if you look at the whole world you you can see that around 1980 our agricultural land started pretty much reaching a plateau and according to foul it peaked around 2000 to 2002 and is now declining so this is about digital economy and it's about Precision in engineering of biology so we are inside this and that means that most of what we do gets more Compact and we are doing this interview using smartphones actually which is an excellent example that everybody knows that if everything that drives a smartphone and is inside a smartphone so the degree that was possible at all in 1980 it would fill a whole house this is so compact now we will see some of this continue the coming Decades of one sector that will really take the lead is in food production the Farmland has flatlined and this is a time where we've doubled the world population and average nutrition amount and quality per capita is also kind of quite massively too much in many cases and yet we've done that we cut the Farmland per capita by around half but there are some radical new technologies where we can cut it even with something like 95 from where we are now you have vertical farming there's a very big project described for Switzerland one of the biggest in the world where you have vegetables growing stacked on top of each other inside buildings and with many growing Seasons throughout the year and so on and this can reduce family and per produced unit by a factor of up to 300. I actually calculated that you could feed all of Switzerland using only 0.3 percent of the Swiss land mass that would be if everybody were vegans which is completely unrealistic but then if we look at meat consumption you have the cultured wheat which is a fairly complex technology but it's breaking through these years every year we'll see new products made really cultured meat where you grow meat cells in steel containers so they're actually not growing on an animal and this is also something that's far more compact than what it replaces if all meat production in the US was produced in this way we could free up natural land equal to six times area of Germany so make Natural Parks and then even more radical is perhaps Precision fermentation so Precision fermentation is something that pharmaceutical companies have been using for some decades to make very expensive components of some medical compounds now this has become Shiba Chiba and then we started using it for elements of very expensive cosmetics and then elements of food like fooding ingredients and so on but it's getting so cheap these years that you can actually make food with it it's quite possible that we'll see the worst food production over the next 50 years becoming so compact that will really see the global Farmland drop which actually has a lot of implications for a lot of sectors including Finance for the farming that stuff is getting more compact in so many ways but we have one big exception which is in this energy conversion that the world is struggling with right now so that energy conversion is not going well at all if you you go back 20 years ago faster you will constitute about 87 percent of the total world energy Supply since then we have invested about five trillion dollars in renewable energy and that has brought the number down from 87 to 84 but meanwhile the global energy consumption has grown by a compound average growth rate about 2.6 and that
means that the fossil fuel economy grows and growth and growth and we are nowhere near reversing that Trend and if we keep going the same way as we've been doing so far we will use far far more fossil fuel in 2050 and in year 2100 as we do today that doesn't sound like a good news at all when we look at the climate change that's not very optimistic on that side note this in isolation is not very optimistic the problem here is that if you look at what we're doing we are going against the meter trend of having one more compact Technologies but because for instance offshore windmills they use many square kilometers to produce the same amount of energy as a very compact gas power plant that or nuclear power plant and also they use about 15 times as much industrial metal if you take a solar power it also uses a lot of industrial metal if you take electric cars you'll use between five and seven times as much industrial missile as what they replaced so we are basically replacing quite compact technology with something that is massively bigger and this can only scale so much one of the problems here is that the mining industry has not invested nearly enough to accommodate ambitious plants to do massive rollout of Renewables are you saying that basically the beautiful plants we had to curb common emissions are just wishful thinking because in reality everything takes more place more resources to build and we're not going to get out of that Circle the problem is that we are too one-sided in our focus on Renewables the depth technologies will emerge one after another it's important that we look at what makes sense where and what makes sense now so if we look at what makes sense where so me being from Denmark wind power definitely makes sense now in Denmark because Denmark has a lot of wind and when there's a surplus we can pump up water and Norwegian dams and so on many places in the world including Switzerland it makes a lot less sense because Switzerland either has hurricane or no wind so everybody have to look at what makes sense where they are but the big impact we can have is shifting from cold to gas and for instance when United States didn't sign the Paris agreement there was an opera and everybody hated them for not doing it but which was the only country who actually fulfill the commitments that were expected in the price agreement that was America and that was because of frackings they were moving from code to guess so culture guessed this is not a movement so something that's perfect but it's a movement that's very scalable to something that is better another thing is to use natural carbon sinks which is something that can be do quite quickly so it only goes so far because if you grow more first it absorbs carbon up to a certain level and then the forces reached its new size and then that stops but it's a quite good intermediate technology what I think is the only technology that can really do the job in the long term is nuclear and nuclear has a very bad reputation but people are very often not aware of the new technologies that have been developed and are in the pipeline which of course most important and available in a very short term is more nuclear reactors and the United States Rolls-Royce in UK who Korean companies Japanese are building and designing these and they can be rolled out very fast but nuclear is an incredible source of power but it also represents risks and when these risks take place then everything is completely unusable for the next thousand years if you look at the actual risks of nuclear in terms of safety is about the same level as wind and solar so it's one of the safest energy resources that we've had so far and it's about a thousand times as safe as cool a lot of coal has been burned because we're afraid of nuclear even though coal actually is far more dangerous so our experience with nuclear is based lastly on nuclear technologies that were rolled out in the 1960s 70s ages and we are completely different place now so we can make a passive Security in nuclear reactors it is really really safe in the new technologies and they are allow us how long does it take to build a nuclear planet for the transition that's very long yes that's another misperception that is out there so for instance what Denmark has become quite famous for building out a big wind capacity yeah is often shows us a leading country in the world in green energy transition the actual reality is that 10 of the Danish energy Supply comes from wind and solar 90 comes from burning oil gas coal and biomass and if Denmark keeps rolling out wind and solar with the speed they've done the last 20 years they will have 100 renewable by year 20 150. it's going so slow and meanwhile while Denmark has been doing this the Emirates have rolled out four times as big nuclear power capacity and so the Koreans can set up a nuclear power plant in four years so the stories we have about how long time it takes to roll up nucleus based on the old Technologies not the new modular ways so when you use nuclear reactions in a factory and ship them out or try them out to the destination you can do it really really quickly and ultimately a quite good relationship with some of the companies that design these rights not I have no commercial or investment relationship I just talk with the people they say automatically we should be able to build a reactor a day in a factory just like during World War II when you needed a lot of bomber and then your converted car factories to building bombers and you were built in like you know Mass producing them at an amazing speed and you can do this there's many other big trends in technology but on that energy part basically your message is a new clear energy is a solution in your mind is that what I have to understand from your point yes if you look at sort of end game in this I think it will be nuclear and building integrated solar panels because building integrated solar panels actually don't take up space because they just constitute the material the surface that you need anyway these Technologies also evolving very quickly do we have what it takes to build the solar panels in Europe so far some components like the Wafers and solar panels 98 or 97 is built in China if you look at the other elements of solar panels is between 70 and 80 or 85 so it's almost entirely built in China so we have a geopolitical risk in that sense we could do it in Europe but it's just I mean the one of the jobs is that it's built in China because you have cheap efficient labor in China but also because they actually use code power because it takes a lot of power to build these things and just as well as it takes a lot of power to build electric cars so typically electric cars they only pay back the CO2 emissions or they have saved equal to the CO2 emissions that went into building then once they've driven about 120 000 kilometers or something like that when we try to solve these problems with very big machines heavy machines we are front loading CO2 emissions in order to save it at a later point just final node on nuclear China has built them and plans to build one more thorium reactor which is a very very safe technology where you use term which is so abundant almost any country has enough to serve itself in U.S that company is sponsored by Bill Gates it is building a traveling wave reactor where they can reuse all the nuclear waste and they expect to be able to power America for 800 years entirely just by reusing nuclear waste and then there are 24 projects in the world with nuclear fusion which is by far the safest this is the same technology as the sun um it's very difficult to get to work but eventually it will work and there's a kind of a more slow where the efficiency doubles every 26 months is fairly few years from working on an experimental basis and they will take maybe 15 years until we have it there we will have enough fuel to power the world for several billion years and the waste is helium which you use to blow up balloons at children's parties so help is on the ways we can hear Cavalry behind the Horizon these Technologies are coming and in the second part of this sensory we'll address it entirely with that I think so that's on the energy side and you bring a bit of optimism there now I'd like to touch on other Technologies such as the famous metaverse do you have any take on that where do you see this going the meter burst so far has been disappointing the one big commercial breakthrough has been the big deal that Microsoft got the selling is actually Advanced reality goggles to the American Military for I think was 19 billion dollars or something like that because it was not a big success to say the least yeah but they still got the contract though after it had been tested it must have been to some big success at least the biggest failure is probably when we saw Mike Zuckerberg without legs in his Miser verse I think the Miss Universe eventually will find this Gooding and become a big thing I think that it's some years away still what is really right in front of us is AI of course by some measures AI the new chat gbg and US seem pretty close to passing a Turing test yesterday I was about to actually post but I didn't post on Twitter as a test user you can use chat gbg and um there was this guy who was critical of chat gbg writing something quite offensive about it and then it wrote that it could expose details about this person's life so it's actually making a threat against this person and then I thought didn't it just pass a touring test right there I mean this seems like a very human to act irrationally like that um co-owner founder and chairman board member of a company called super Trends where we map innovation in the world and we have met all human and pre-human Invasion so we have the top 12 000 Innovations of all time so we think a lot about what are the most important ones you know control of fire and the wheel and so on I think that if I should take the top 10 in the entire human history I might consider to add AI before that would be the internet personal computer electricity steam engine and so on AI is so radical because we will start to get intelligence which develops more intelligence so recursive intelligence is beginning right now Singularity is coming actually where AI goes beyond the human capabilities yes I think we should think of the singularity as a single point in time because even when I was very young I had a casual calculator when I was at the University which could calculate things much faster than I could do I was surpassed by a computer then and this is many years ago but they created capabilities and the ability to write software and the ability to ask intelligent questions not only us answer questions makes it very different so one thing that's very important that with AI computers can do automatic hypothesis generation they can study information and then they can come with valid hypothesis this has been used for quite some years now but it's getting very extreme so there was an example this this was by IB Chrysler years ago I think it was in 2014 where they had a computer read more than 100 000 different scientific papers about A protein that is relevant for cancer and then they asked it to to propose some ways to use this knowledge to find treatments for cancer and it came up with a number of proposals and they made this deliberate cut up and then they looked at what have scientists after that cut out date actually discovered and turned out that most of what we did suggested had been tested later on by a scientists and had been found to be valid but the interesting thing is that the computer goes in and reads studies enormous amount of material and then things about what can work you use it now in the pharmaceutical industry where with the computers you study how proteins fold in 3D and then you create hypothesis about how you create new medications and so on this is taking epic proportions and in our company's super experience is fairly small but we have 11 AI projects we use AI to measure language processing to read scientific news from the last number of credible databases and then write summaries and we have people checking the summaries then we use AI to suggest tagging we have people checking the taking but we also want to use AI to Simply search in our database and give an answer so our database kind of similar to Bloomberg but Bloomberg is you know live database so financial information ours is a live database of innovation information but we want people to be able to talk with it so if you want to go into a meeting about the missile sink or about 3D printing of food and just before you leave you could just ask the computers which technologies will impact the market facing and then you get a report breaking all the different databases and sources and predictions and new stores and so on that we have and similar for other things so you have developed your own chat GPT basically does it use machine learning did you create a whole neural network so we don't develop a chill intelligence we use different off-the-shelf tools and there are lots of them and so they are good for making illustrations some are good Financial language processing some for writing code and so on so we use the ones that are relevant for what we need to do but the interesting thing is that this is cheap so this is similar to when the internet came out and companies had to figure out how to use the internet the challenge was in the beginning to figure out how to use it but actually using it was not expensive you took a different AI systems you connect to them and you put your own system on top of that to bring your own knowledge in there yeah we train the AI to solve a task force let's say that if you want to use AI to be an artificial receptionist so a chatbot for a specific company it takes something like typically two months to train it for that even though the data is far more sophisticated all the data is available in written materials so we can train it faster but what would take a hundred people a year ago we can do with five that this is Improvement our productivity of a factor 20 that doesn't mean that we plan to fire anybody but we plan to massively increase what we can deliver to the clients question on how you train AI so basically how does that work you have this external AI systems and then you train them you give your own content to them do they own then that content or you still keep the IEP on that content no no we still own the consensus our use of AI Works entirely within what's called A World Garden in ic so we have this close database that's a three-step process if not more steps but you have the wide world of data some of this data is extremely well organized like crunchbase which is a database of startup companies Twitter and so on scientific news databases but you also have what you find if you just do a Google Search and so on so all of this data we bring it into our Ward Garden where we structure and then we check it and we use AI to help us bring you in there but once it's in there and people want to communicate with it we had to train AI to deliver a result in nice formats so let's say I work for Glencoe and I'm planning to have a meeting with Glencoe and I want to know about which technologies will impact the supply and demand of sync the next 10 years I want to be able to ask the computer this question and then I want a nicely structured Report with graphs and overviews and a timeline of future events and so on so you train the AI to deliver it in in a desirable format and that is not such a big task and once you've done that it just can do it all the time basically AI is an external company so you have not structured a whole set of information that you provide AI learns and you see in which format you want it to return the reports but how do you know that this AI now has learned they have all the information from your company they are able to create these reports do you keep the IP of all that input or does that new AI now have it no they don't let's say you use tally for instance to say can you make a painting or a pink elephant climbing the Eiffel Tower in the style of Picasso it can do that it can do it in the Stylo because because it has looked at lots and lots of tagged paintings in the style of Picasso it does not have a single painting in the style of Picasso in his memory what it has information about how he works but it doesn't have the actual paintings and this is one reason why it avoids a big recovery issue when it does these kind of things I have a few friends online who are artists they were reacting very very strongly with AI but it would be a discussion for another time maybe we'll do another interview on the topic but what about the blockchain do you have an idea on that technology where is this going to I'm not really an expert of blockchain even though I'm a good friend of Nicholas nikolaison who's a founder of Bitcoin Swiss the way blockchain has evolved has been very very different from what we normally see with new chords acknowledges normally when you have a new core technology Francis macronus and other people's invention of radio Technologies for a long time you don't have great applications for it and this is because the people who develop the core technology are nerds the engineers and the people that have to make these vacations are typically very very different personality and you need different business models and then you get into this really of disappointment and then the applications come where blockchain is really unusual is that it came with the killer app one killed in so Bitcoin cryptocurrency and blockchain at the same time we have crypto value stretching from silk to other culture centers around the world lots of companies are working on lost and lost ideas as far as I can see still with a massive overweight it is all about cryptocurrency still you have ethereum you have Concord which is led by one of my other friends last night yeah by the way in super Trends so we work quite closely together you have implementations where you can use blockchain in very very smart ways and you speak about smart ways in the famous smart contracts can really make it to challenge actually even insurance companies and banking you can create your own little Bank thanks to a Smart contract that's quite a revolution yeah in many ways so let's say the shipping container rushed and brought it down Harbor and by a GPS hypnosis there and in a sense a message I've arrived safely and then it triggers some kind of payments perhaps a termination of an insurance contract or the likes eventually there will be a massive amounts of similar things in Hong Kong they have tested using money that expire and you can use money that can only be used for let's say you've gone through covet and all the restaurants are like this uh you could release money that could only be used for restaurants for like three months or you you have all these possibilities So eventually it is the internet of value and eventually it will pay very big but I think it goes through this this Valley of inflated expectations and then disappointment and then come back too much productivity yeah it will be like a black slope in Switzerland and we are in the middle of it I think right now it will come up much much stronger when you're here often very intelligent very skilled people completely downplay or even condemn cryptocurrencies then missing some of the point for instance when they say Bitcoin or cryptocurrencies have no value no intrinsic value well dollars and euros and Swiss Francs have no intrinsic value it's it's based on network effect so John Law will choose paper money in Europe it's been well known and it was described by John Lord that money is not what you trade things for but what you trained things by so when you had gold cards you actually traded for it because it was an intrinsic value in Gold you could use for jewelry and whatnot but fired money have had it for a long time and crypto is also fired money it's just private there's a challenge in this I'm fairly libertarian in many ways that's one of the reasons why I live in libertarian Switzerland annual sedation on top of that I mean quite open-minded country yeah I I am actually a great fan of Central Banking well I know that Central Banking has done a lot to stabilize the world economy and the problem is that if central banks controlled become irrelevant then I think the world economy will become far more unstable the big value is not the ability to replace money created by central banks but to just add smart money or tokens and smart contracts and so on just a side remark that their last um if you have countries which have a good economy it's well managed the central banks play an important role but for some countries I could say in the Venezuela or Argentina or or Zimbabwe where the governments have had let's say some so quite lenient approach to economy where these central banks are not really serving the people so there they have an alternative with cryptocurrency the ethereum ETC so what you say applies maybe to developed and well-managed economies but for other economies might be good to have an alternative or yes it is and it can have very great social value recently population of European has been one of the biggest uses of cryptocurrencies exactly because when there's complications and transferring value through normal means they can use this Lebanon was using this a lot or Latin America yeah and foreign Witnesses from guest workers from Western caps license or worked in America Europe they send often a substantial part of the money back to the family at Great cost and with great delays and probably also some risk of it getting stolen and here you also have great the social benefit this should also be brought into the equation I think we could talk about these very exciting Technologies for quite a while but I would like to pick your brains on another topic which is very important to our viewers and to ourselves actually education now we have the tech is this going to influence education the way we train people and educate the next generation first of all the speed of technology is accelerating all the time and that means that whatever we learn of technical information age faster and faster and I saw a recent study that said that every time until what you learn in technical education is stated this down through three years and that it means that if you take a five-year master's degree or a seven year PhD by the time you you graduate a lot of what you have learned in the process is already worthless or updated maybe it makes it more easy for you to understand what came after but it gets stated so quickly this speaks for short formal education but also within organizations corporate or public that you should think more uh helping your staff with education the same way as Spotify help us get music and that means that you're a snackable small education objects and for instance some companies have been very good at making this C of these small information objects and then if you go in and you find one object that's relevant for what you have to do now so just in time information then it says if you like this you probably also like that so you'll have algorithm or AI that helps you navigate this we have this old thinking where you have a career ladder and the organizations help you build your career ladder you do this and you do that we should think about that it gets more fluid and instead of having this formal module based system that you have a more flow based system where you can just flow from item to item and pick up the relevant information just in time when it's just in time it's far more motivating more so on a similar vein you can also think about having a geek economy within a big Corporation so that you can register as an employee or if you're associated with the company in any way even as a subcontractor you register what your company sensors are and what your interests are could be anything from working at home or working in a specific country because you have a boyfriend girlfriend there or anything else then when they have charts they they put it out we have this new task and who are willing and able to work on that this combines a number of different issues first of all when technology is changing so fast it becomes more useful that people can move around and organize spontaneously in different ways very quickly but there's a rising demand for being able to work with different things and different places and so on instead of having formal boxes you have something where you have lots of small objects and everybody can recombine them very quickly on the Fly and go back to Spotify so Spotify have I think is 16 million songs but it creates for me everyday recommendation in the morning normally I do Fitness training from 10 to 11 Spotify has figured that out so it knows at that time I want music that's suitable for that but wait a second first some people like these boxes I am in that box of that box I know where I belong and I have this kind of safety and second Spotify was also questioned because the artist at the end said well we don't make much money so if I use Spotify as an example for the gig economy I'm just challenging you there you're a Libertarian you said so you bring a lot of freedom to the foreign economy but that can be scary for a lot of people which is about the future technology and then how to organize companies for it and I hate these management books that says this is happening everything is going this way if you don't do this you're dead because the world is very diverse and for instance many of these new fancy Technologies are completely irrelevant for a Swiss watchmaker because people why buy Swiss watches because they're old-fashioned doesn't you want them to read the old-fashioned lots of what you think about in management has to be only that that you think about you think about whether a new trend is relevant and for many it is for some it is now about the business model of Spotify yes this is true this is I mean there's some there's an issue about the payment of the artist but I'm talking about using the technology within a corporate environment so using the technological features they have in order to enable people to find the information they need and in order to find the jobs that they would like to do when are capable of doing and this doesn't doesn't change how much they're paid it's just a way of being more efficient created you spoke about the career ladder earlier you speak about a gig economy do you think that the companies will be the same in 10 years we saw the great resignation of young bright talents just said well I don't want to have this gold climb up that ladder what's going to happen next 10 years it will continue to move in that direction I was a study of generation set so this was a forecast but the forecast said that the average person of generation said which are the ones born between 1995 and 2010 I think so once who are about to join the labor market soon or first of them are doing it now but said they would on average have six different careers I think they would have 16 jobs and live 12 places something like that people are beginning to more think of Life as a sequence of experiences and it's not like you have to choose the education for the rest of your life you can actually choose the right education that will suit you the next 10 years and and within those 10 years you can easily graduate to something different and then after that to something different again and so on this is not going away in swear I attractive but my life has been like that I've been in many different sectors and worked with many different things and I educated myself and that's perfectly never weight loss you're not sure exactly represents the regular worker so for you I need excitement to create your build several companies could I get it but for the people who have less of a flexibility you might have less opportunities that might be quite a big stress a big change ahead how do our societies react to that it is and we have to recognize that a lot of people don't want any of this there has to be a roles probably for people who don't want any of this that that against goes back to what I said about management books that say everything has to be in a special way I like very much former McKenzie consultant who wrote the book Reinventing organizations and also a very nice Illustrated companion about the book where he describes five different basic forms of organizations that mankind has invented he says any company should be a combination of some of those it's not saying that one is completely replacing another one that's the way it is if you take pharmaceutical companies or Banks they have compliance as a big thing compliance has to be very formal it has to be centralized otherwise you will make terrible mistakes you also have marketing and some parts of marketing probably benefits from being very big and going into it but then the other parts of what they do where you have to have very very adaptive fluid systems and treat every client and every employee as a unique person every corporate client as completely segment of one so you have to combine the two things and this this is of course demanding but it's also full of opportunities so some kind of mass customization delivering the individual solutions to the masses just on that note there's a dynamic that is changing when you do this when I was studying business I was brought up with marketing as a push mentality so you sit there and incorporate and you define segments big groups or people and then you find push strategy how to approach these people but especially with AI and statistical algorithm running using the internet the dynamic changes every client puts from you what they want and for instance the fact that Spotify delivers energetic music to me between 10 and 11 is because it has discovered that that's what I click on that's what I wanted to listen to because I'm doing workout so in that sense we are moving more from a push strategy to a pool strategy which requires a lot of Smart Computing you've been an entrepreneur for many years would you have some kind of advice to gen Zed future workers saying hey these are the key things you might want to look at to have a successful future my first piece of advice is very much run-of-the-mill but it's very very important I think you have to go for intrinsic motivation so just you have two kinds of motivation you have exterior motivations like Prestige money other people's expectations for you and then you have interior which is basically either a higher purpose something you really want to achieve because you feel is good or you love doing the task you are far more like it to succeed if you can find something that has intrinsic motivation for you so it's worth thinking about it actually takes some time to find out what is your intrinsic motivation which there are lots of tests you can say what are my moral instincts what's my personality how do I learn do I learn by Reading Writing listening speaking doing physically what when do I feel flow when do I ever experience something I do where I'm completely captivated by it and I forget time and place all of this for a young person takes time to find out but eventually if you search test yourself try many different things you'll find that and then when you start an entrepreneurship project it's really far best if you have this kind of feeling second thing is learn something about entrepreneurship as a craft I've myself co-author of a book which is funny enough called entrepreneur what we learned from starting of 30 companies but this guy had actually started 30 companies by himself but not to overdo it we said I had started 13 and year started 30 so we wrote that we just put in really practical tools that you know about entrepreneurship because the entrepreneurship is very very different from working in established organizations there's just a lot of stuff you just needed to know about you can read about that so you can prepare yourself for what you go into yeah just touch on entrepreneurship and big companies we had quite a few talents we had great careers in bleeding companies when the transition to entrepreneurship that was a big shock even though they are very bright that shift methodology the 80 20. this was a
big learning for them quite painful actually have you noticed anything like this we actually wrote about it in our book so yes I tried it I have a daughter who's also a great entrepreneur one day she comes to me and said that we had a top manager from and then it's one of the biggest German companies applying for a job I was really surprised why she wanted to do it and we explained it so shall I I find it hard you think there's something wrong or whatever and then I told her you have to figure out exactly what is the motivation but I just want to tell you that I have from time to time in my 13 startups I had people came from Big corporate for me every time it's been a disappointment doesn't have to be every time that's a big statement wow it starts with if you work in a big corporate your agenda is laid out for you it's just full of meeting your budget me in Market meeting private loans meetings and so on and you just go to this and manage that but when you get into a startup there's nothing in your agenda like nothing at all and you have to figure you have to invent everything yourself there's no point in writing reports because even if you didn't know what it would have time to read them but in many cases there are nobody to read and so also the fact that you have to go directly from idea to execution try to execute really fast and then if it doesn't work you just do something else it's very very different and also when the printer doesn't work you have to fix it yourself and in startups you have to be available or waiting hours in weekends and holidays if you don't want to be disturbed you put your phone on silent I don't know weekends being different from work days and startups and so many many differences from the corporate life one thing I really saw from the difference with this corporate life and these were really hard working people so not beginners high level very smart but I think in a startup obviously by definition you're starting rather than well established so you have a lot of things which are insecure and and finalized so you have to live with a lot of variables a lot of things that are not fully fledged yet that proved to me as a quite source of frustration for these people from Big corporates yeah that's true you're you're working with a massive amount of serious uncertainty and probably if you really investigated statistically startups you'll probably find that most of them sometimes operate without having certainty about their ability to pay their bills which would be illegal but they do it anyway and and like everybody's just saying we can't have startups it will really go after that but if you come from a big corporate where you have very strict compliance lines and then you come into a startup and they don't know how to pay their salaries nine weeks from now you will say yeah we have to close the company we have to tell people that we are heading for bankruptcy but great entrepreneurs they don't think like that don't you I will fix that I'll find a wish and they hustle this mentality is so different can feel extremely intimidating if you come from Big corporate great loss I think we could go on for quite a while but I would like to thank you for this very interesting discussion thank you very much for sharing your thoughts on entrepreneurship on technology education and what can we wish you for the next times ahead you can wish me good luck with my company super Trends there's no lack of hard labor and ideas but we need we need good luck to really grow as quickly as we think we can good luck to your company all the best thanks for the great chat today with pleasure you take care of real pleasure take care
2023-03-27