Bill Gross discusses IdeaLab's approach to generating ideas internally rather than accepting outside proposals. He explains how the company prioritizes impact over return on investment when deciding which ideas to pursue.
So I was reading about Idealab, I'm in the MSME 178 class and we had we have a discussion before each of the speakers come in. And one of the questions that kept coming up was the fact that idealab is kind of like something between a venture capital firm and a startup incubator. And the one big difference is that you guys don't take outside ideas and kind of come up with your own ideas. And I guess I was wondering, obviously it's been successful so far, especially since a lot of the companies that have been shown in the slides have been acquired or have done well for themselves. But I was just wondering, do you ever think that or do you think that that's a competitive advantage that you don't take outside business proposals, that you don't spend the time that VCs doing meeting entrepreneurs? Or do you ever feel that idea generation becomes stagnant with only the staff.
At IdeaLab question about the idea generation and taking ideas from the outside? I actually think it's a competitive disadvantage that we wouldn't take ideas from the outside and meet outside entrepreneurs. So we're actually start starting to do that more. The reason we did it was not because it's smart or not. It's just we had more ideas we wanted to do than we could find people to do. It's been my problem all my life that just every week we're coming up with a new idea. We would do 52 companies a year if we could. And it's just finding talent to execute on those ideas that is the bottleneck. So we are taking having people come to us from the outside with ideas. Sometimes that idea merges with one of ours. Sometimes we'll fund that company separately. But I really think of what we do as we're really trying to be more of a lab where we can do where we have the chance just because we like it. I'm not saying this is a good business model. We love doing it. We love being in the part of experiencing new idea generation, trying them out and seeing what works and doesn't work. That's just fun to us. And the other aspect that we're trying to do is we're trying to make a big impact. So we actually are looking probably in our criteria for going forward with an idea. Will this idea be something that someone else would never have done? Because then we can make more impact on the world. We'd rather do something. Sometimes we come up with ideas. A great idea test out as a business model, but it's sort of close to what other people are doing. So even if we can make an okay business, it's just not interesting enough for us. Again, that's just our choice. So we try and judge on impact, not roi, sort of impact roi. And we try and find ways to meet great people who can help us do the things that we think will have big impact.
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