Success Guaranteed: What All Ultra Successful Founders (or Companies) Have in Common w/ Salim Ismail | EP #45

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Visit phoenix.edu Some people think nature is like this, but actually it's like this. That's why Columbia engineers everything we make for anything nature can throw at you. Columbia engineered for whatever. We're seeing companies going from startup to a multi billion dollar valuation like inside of a year.

It's an existential threat for the incumbents.

The world is very different today for an entrepreneur than it was even 20 years ago.

We've never seen companies scale so fast. But all of them, every single one of them, had this one common thing, which was a purpose.

How do you decide what to say no to?

What fundamental problem are you trying to solve?

The MTP is the emotional energy that drives you. It's what keeps you at your North Star when things get tough. And doing anything big and bold in the world is hard. Hey, welcome to Moonshots and Mindsets. I'm here with my dear friend Salim Ismail, the co author of Exponential Organizations 2.0, with me, the first CEO of Singularity University. And we're going to be talking about something that just lights my soul on fire, and hopefully yours as well, which is the whole topic of having a massive transformative purpose as the bedrock of, of creating an exponential organization. But before we talk about an mtp, Salim, tell us, what is an exponential organization? And why the hell does it matter?

Hey Peter. So an EXO is a new breed of organization that allows you to scale your organization structure as fast as you can scale technology. And pretty much all organizations in the 21st century will be built in this way. And that's essentially the definition.

I know, and I want to just put an exclamation point on that. These are organizations, exponential organizations. I mean, let's face it, the world is very different today if you're an entrepreneur or if you're the CEO or a business owner than it was 50 years ago, 30 years ago, even 20 years ago, right? We're seeing companies going from startup to a multi billion dollar valuation, like inside of a year. We've seen incredible work, we've seen companies like, you know, OpenAI basically just put the huge behemoths of Microsoft and Google and Apple sort of on back on their heels. What is going on? What is different? We've seen Uber and Airbnb come out of no place and transform industries. Not Just a company transform entire industries. And these are the fundamentals of an exponential organization. Give me one more layer of definition of exo if you would, Salim.

It's where you can scale your organization as fast as you can scale technology, where the marginal cost of supply goes to near zero. If you take Uber, the cost of adding a car to their inventory is near zero. Whereas if you're hurt, you have to buy a car and add it to your fleet and do all the management of that asset and all that stuff. And now we're seeing entire industries crop up where the marginal cost is dropping to near zero. It's an existential threat for the incumbents.

Yeah. And so in exponential organizations we talk about the 10 attributes that, well studied, well documented, these are the attributes 5 internal, 5 external that these exos have, that if you're starting a company, by the way, if you're an entrepreneur trying to figure out what to do next, beginning as an exponential organization from your birth as a data driven experimental company with interfaces tapping into the crowd, all of these attributes is amazing. If you're an old style company who is looking to transform yourself, it's hard, but we're going to talk about the incredible elements. What I liken this revolution to is an asteroid impact moment. 65 million years ago, an asteroid struck the planet and the slow lumbering dinosaurs died and went extinct. It was the furry little mammals that could adapt to the rapidly changing environment that were able to survive. And the asteroid that struck, struck humanity and struck the entrepreneurial business world is exponential technologies. And they've caused such a flurry, such a change. You know, we've seen all of these companies, old style lumbering companies, linear companies going bankrupt over the last number of years. But that's not the topic of our talk today. The topic of our talk today is the underlying fundamental of an EXO called an mtp.

So the way this came about is when we started looking at this new model, new breed of organization. And I just want to go back into history a bit. When we were running one week executive programs at Singularity University, you and I were on stage, et cetera. We kept getting this question, okay, after a week of a CEO sitting in the class hearing about these breakthroughs, 20 Gutenberg moments, asteroid impacts, they go, okay, I get the disruption, I totally got that. What the hell do I do on Monday? Basically, the book and the lecture and the thesis of an exo was the response to that question, how do you adapt and organize for this fast changing world? And what we did was we scanned 200 of the fastest growing unicorns in the world and said, how are they scaling so fast? How has Ted gone from a single conference to a global media brand in less than 10 years? How is Amazon doing this? We've never seen companies scale so fast. And we looked at the characteristics of them and tagged them all out. And Uber uses staff on demand. And Airbnb is leveraging other people's assets. And there's different characteristics, but all of them, every single one of them, had this one common thing, which was a purpose. And we brand that as an mtp. What is your massive transformative purpose? Uber is that everybody should have a private driver. Google is the most famous organizer World's information. XPrize. Peter is.

Yeah. Create a world of abundance.

Go ahead.

Yeah. No, it's critically important. And in fact, those of you who know me know I have an MTP for myself. It's to inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling, and abundant future of humanity. And I wake up every day in the shower. I'll say that two or three times through the day. I'll say it two or three times. It focuses me. You know, we're living in this world of so much opportunity. If you're an investor or an entrepreneur or a business owner, you're being hit with deal after deal after deal all the time. New technology, new information, new opportunities. I call it drowning in abundance. And we truly are living in a world where there's just more than you can possibly even absorb, let alone take advantage of. So how do you select what you do or don't do? Martin Rothblatt, who is an incredible moonshot entrepreneur, she's on her seventh or eighth moonshot. I remember she gave me a quote. I'm going to paraphrase it. She said, the difference between successful entrepreneurs and very successful entrepreneurs is successful entrepreneurs say no to many things. The most successful entrepreneurs say no to almost everything. That's interesting because how do you decide what to say no to? And it really is your MTP as your filter. If you're clear about the purpose in life you have that you wake up with and you go through the day, you're going to use that to parse. Like, this helps me in achieving my mtp, and this does not.

Right. Well, I think this becomes, you know, we're in a hyper volatile, very uncertain world where things are changing dynamically. And if you're growing a company and you're growing super fast, you have to be hyper focused as to what fundamental problem are you trying to solve. And the MTP serves as the tagline that guides the entire company because you don't have time to get doing all hands and get everybody thinking along everyday lines every day because the world is changing. So think it becomes the single point, focal point where everybody can go, okay, that's what we're about. And if some junior manager somewhere is trying to evaluate two alternatives and which one fits the MTP better, becomes the easiest heuristic in the world to go, okay, which one helps do that? And then you focus on that and allows you to push that entire decision making down into the organization. We found it's also incredibly good for hiring and retention because the younger generation is very purpose driven. And it turns out it's fabulous during periods of hyper growth to keep everybody focused during these scalable periods. So it turns out every single one of them had this MTP characteristic and you frame it as moonshots. And we should talk about the difference between an MTP and moonshots. And Peter, you've got I think the best clarification around that.

So I think about your massive transformative purpose. We'll go into more detail and I think every entrepreneur as an individual and every company should have a massive transformative purpose. And it can be the same or it could be different. But your MTP is the canvas upon which you are painting your entrepreneurial world. First MTP, I remember it in my early 20s it was to make humanity a multi planetary species. It was opening up space privately that drove me. It drove the first dozen companies that I started. Then on that canvas of opening up space, I took very clear moonshots. My first one was to build an international space university which today is in Strasbourg, France. ISU is doing amazingly well building that university to attract talent from around the planet. The next one was on making private space flight, demonstrating private space flight, which we did with the original Ansari X Prize that was funded by Anoush Ansari and won by Paul Allen and Bert Rutan. And from that X Prize grew the entire private spaceflight industry. Back when it was won in 2004, there were others, zero G and so forth. So I think about the MTP is the emotional energy that drives you. It's what keeps you going. It's your North Star when things get tough and doing anything big and bold in the world is hard. And unless you have an MTP driving you, that emotional energy, you'll give up before you get there. And so it's that North Star, it's the emotional energy and then your moonshot is a very clear Objective. It's like, I'm going to do this by this. And this is how I know I got there, and this is how the rest of the world knows I got there. Yeah. What's your mtp, Celine?

Mine is to transform civilization. It's a niche project, niche effort. You know, I've been lucky enough to be at the forefront of cutting edge technologies. Plus, I have a deep. I have a diplomacy background. My family was heavily into foreign service and helped in the independence movement in India. So there's some genetic obligations there. And I find my Tony Robbins, I remember once you brought him to Singularity once. And he took me aside and he goes, you know, there's a lot of people that know that the world is changing a great deal. And I call that the TED crowd. I'm like, okay. He goes, there's a subset of that group that knows how broad and deep that transformation is. And I call that the Singularity group. Okay? And he goes, but there's a, there's a. The people that actually know what to do about this. I would put on the fingers of one hand, and you're one of those people, so if you have any inclination in doing something about this, don't stop. And I was like, you know, talk about being called to the mat. And so I thought about, okay, I have this luxury of being able to choose anything. What's the biggest problem in the world? I'll do one more little segue here, which is I, you know, I used to do these late night meaning of life metaphysics discussions.

I remember those. We've had a lot of long nights.

So I did one in Toronto, Okay. And my dad came to. He's 90 years old, so he's sitting, and somebody said to me, hey, I loved your TEDx talk titled Fixing Civilization, where I talk about the immune system problem. My dad, hands go, goes up and he goes, can I heckle? And we're like. I'm like, yeah, you know, of course you can heckle. He goes, totally disagree with your talk. I'm like, really? Do you not think we need to fix civilization? I mean, you know, really? And he's like, no, the fixing part, of course we need to fix it. My issue is with the civilization part. He said, we've not civilized the world, we've materialized the world. Now we have to do the work to civilize it. Right? It was like wisdom of the elders. Boom. I lost all credibility for the rest of that session because every time I said something, they're like, what does your dad think? And it really set me on a path going, wow, we actually need to civilize the world. And so that's where my MTP comes from, is that fundamental problem of the systemic change of society that is instigated by this incredible 20 Gutenberg moments, the asteroid impacts that is coming along. And the book is kind of like the starting point and the model is the starting point for all of that.

A quick break from our episode. On June 6, Salim and I are going to be running a free three hour workshop on how to actually build and design an exponential organization. Would love to have you join us. If you join us on June 6th. First of all, you'll get free access to the book Exponential Organizations 2.2.0. Access to an AI that we've built that allows you to query the book and helps you design your exponential organization. It's June 6th, it's three hours, it's free. We've never done this before. Click on the link below diamandis.com EXO and join us. All right, now back to the episode. So why an MTP matters? So the first thing, and it's really important if you have your MTP and we can talk about how you develop one. I think every exponential entrepreneur and every exponential organization needs to have an mtp. You need to put it out there. It helps the world know what you stand for. Right? That's critically important. So if I said, what is SpaceX's MTP or Elon's MTP, I think everybody knows it's get humanity to Mars. Get your ass to Mars. Or for Tesla it's Electrify. Electrify the planet. The second thing, and I think, you know, we're still, until we have AGI, you know, artificial general intelligence, we are still in a massive competition for talent. And having a clear MTP helps attract talent to you and your company, would you agree with that?

100%. And not just talent, but like minded talent. Right. You want people that are aligned and are interested in the same problem. And I think one of Elon's gifts is he can attract people that are all passionate about that particular problem and.

Bringing them to one place, amazing. The other thing, and I mentioned this a bit earlier, is your MTP focuses your emotional energy and it fuels your moonshots. I can't stress this enough, doing anything big and bold. I said this already in the world is hard and you're going to fail over and over and over again until you win. And unless it's driven by some deep emotional energy. And that emotion can be a positive energy like awe, like I want to explore the universe or pain, like I was hurt by this, by this situation in our system and I want to solve it. You're going to give up before you get there. And so, you know, another thing people realize these moonshots are, you know, 10 year adventures. They're not overnight. This, I described this of MTP versus moonshot. But let me give you this visual here. Your MTP is this canvas, this large yellow area here. And mine again was to irreversibly, privately open space. And then you take these moonshots on that MTP canvas. One moonshot was building this International Space University, another one was creating this $10 million prize. And it really allows you to implement your MTP in a very concrete way fashion. Mtps. You know, we had this in, in the first book, Exponential Organizations, the characteristics, it's massive. It inspires you. Anything else you want to say about massive, Saleem?

It's massive. It doesn't have to be world changing. It can be. As long as it's massive to you, it's good enough, right? It could be changed in industry, which is massive enough. But the bigger it is, the more you'll focus and the more canvas you have to play with in a sense, right? So the more massive it is, the bigger the canvas. You can dabble.

I keep on coming back to this emotional energy. We're humans and we are living an emotional life. I got this from Tony Robbins more than anything. So it's driven by this emotional energy. It's deep seated in you, it wakes you up, it keeps you going at night, it occupies your shower time.

I like to say this is something we didn't have in the first book.

Book.

And I love this connection you brought to it, which is the connection to the emotion because we are biological creatures driven by emotion and it's that emotional aspect that brings us together as a tribe or as a community looking to solve a particular problem. And so I think this is so critical about how they think about problem solving going forward.

The next thing is, you know, for me, you need to be committed to your MTP for enough time that you have a chance to do something. We'll talk about this a little bit. You can have multiple MTPs over time and I've evolved mine. I'm on my third one now. But if you're going to do something significant, it takes time. It's happening faster than ever. But I like to say you should be willing to commit to this for 10 years. It may be that after six months you decide no, this isn't it. I want to change it, which is fine. But when you've locked in, I think there needs to be a decade commitment. Do you agree with that, Saleem?

Yeah, because it takes like 10 years to do anything meaningful. You know, you often say there was like this was an overnight success after 11 years.

11 years of hard work. Yeah, Right.

And it looks like it's a classic exponential. You kind of plunder along and all of a sudden it hits and everybody thinks you're a genius and you're like, yeah, I've been working at this for like 11 years. We should. And it just seems it takes that long to solve a major problem.

People don't realize, oh my God, Elon's amazing. He's become richest man on the planet. And don't realize that SpaceX is now 23 years old and he was on the edge of bankruptcy in 2008. And every single story of every major success has gone through this. Anyway, the next one I have is a true mtp. Gives you or your company focus to shoot for. And that is one of the most valuable things is this focusing element of what not to do as well as what to do.

You know, this is worth touching here on. When I looked at, I was the head of innovation at Yahoo, running their incubator and we're looking around and then Yahoo collapsed and we were doing Singularity. And we look back, you look at Yahoo, Nokia, BlackBerry, BlackBerry, for example, never had an MTP. So they built this monster company, the biggest mobile phone company on the planet, hyper successful, but they didn't have that thing that just kept them going and they basically lost interest and the whole company stalled and imploded.

By the way, sometimes it could have an mtp, but it gets lost. Like, I love George Eastman starts Kodak. And the reason he started Kodak was to preserve people's memories. He didn't start Kodak to be in the paper and chemicals business, which was its profit center. And so when Kodak actually invented the digital camera, which was a much more efficient way to preserve people's memories, they didn't take advantage of their own breakthrough and it drove them into bankruptcy and oblivion. So if you're a founder of a company really instantiating, like will SpaceX go to Mars even if Elon has an untimely accident? Right.

This is such a critical point, Peter, that you have to walk away from things that don't match the mtp, right?

Oh, my God, the times I have failed is because I didn't do that 100%.

You know, a friend of mine said, if it's not a hell yes about something, it's a no.

Yeah.

So make sure it's a hell yes. And it fits your MTP perfectly. And it might be worth you telling the story of Elon and the Falcon 9 in the heavy.

Yeah, it's a great story, Salim. So I had known Elon back when he sold PayPal to eBay before he started SpaceX. I was there in his old Hawthorne factory when they were building Falcon 1. When they finally got Falcon 1, their first launch vehicle, after three failures. This is not giving up. On the fourth attempt, they got it successful. They then won a contract for Falcon 9, a vehicle they had not built. And when they won that contract for Falcon 9, he burned the ships. He said, no, we're going to stop selling the Falcon 1 and Falcon 1E. We're going to focus 100% of our energy on the Falcon 9. Even though they had a working Falcon 1 that was in its own right, a disruptive launch vehicle, and it was doing great, but they focused on Falcon 9. Amazing. It went on. It's now become the most successful, by huge orders of magnitude successful launch vehicle on the planet. I was having lunch with him, I don't know, this is probably about seven years ago or so now. And he was really, he was upset, he was bothered there was something going on. I said, hey, what's up? And he goes, I just figured out there's no way that Falcon 9 is going to allow us to get our mission to go on to Mars and we have to retool everything. And what he was realizing was they needed to switch the entire organization from the Falcon 9 to Starship, which is now, you know, beginning its launch and testing sequence. And he said publicly that once Starship is operational, we're going to burn the ships again and stop producing the Falcon 9. And driven again by that massive transformative purpose of getting to Mars. And any sane entrepreneur. I'm not saying Elon's insane. He's brilliant.

Let's just call it.

You're going to milk the most successful launch vehicle for the rest of forever. 50 countries would give their GDP to have Falcon 9 on their soil anyway. That's a great example of focus. Let me go to number five here. An MTP feels true and authentic for you. It's got it. You know, when you say it, it has to be ring true in your heart and soul as the CEO, as the entrepreneur, or as the head of marketing for a company. It can't be this Made up, greenwashing. You have to truly feel it. What do you think about that one?

Absolutely. And it speaks a bit. It builds off the emotional side. Right. If you have to wake up at 6am for 10 years to be able to solve this problem, if it's not true and authentic and really a representation of what you were put on the planet to do, then it's never going to work.

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Totally agree. In my case, it tends not to work that well because in a cocktail party, somebody says, what are you about? And I go, I'm about to transform. They kind of mutter gently and kind of pull away because they can't get their head around the scope of that. Right. And I think the. But in general, you're absolutely correct. It has to be easy to remember, and you have to be able to live it. It's like it's an abbreviation of even the elevator pitch of forget. 30 seconds. It should be five seconds. There's one key point that I want to make, and I don't know if you have it on the next slide or not, which is it has to be declarative. Right. Google doesn't say, we're organizing the world's information. It's a call to action to the community saying, organize the world's information and we'll give you the tool set and create an environment where you can do that and help us do that. And so it's really important. People often get stuck in what I'm going to do, and it should be what is a call to action for a broader community to get involved in. Like, cure cancer would be one.

You know, what I want folks to remember when they're working on their mtp. And it's not easy. And people have worked for a while. Some people get it instantly. Some people know it in their heart and their soul already. But, you know, there is no.

There are those people because it took me like 50 years to find my MTP. And I was like, why couldn't I have this when I was 5?

Well, and some. And some folks do. They know it from a child. Right? I knew it from the first time I saw Star Trek and the Apollo 11 moon landing. That's who I am. That's what I'm going to do now. I'll come back to that in a minute because it's. While it's still there deep inside me, it's not my current mtp. So there is no right or wrong answer. And people are trying to find the right answer? No, it's what feels right for you, what feels good. The second is when you create your mtp. You can iterate it, rewrite it, experiment with it until it feels right. And I tell people, listen, you've got to test this in the real world. And you test it in a conversation with employees that you're hiring, your marketing language for your organization, you test it in conversation and if you're proud of it, you're not embarrassed by it, you're willing to shout it from the mountaintops. That's when you know and then it can change over time. So you know, for a decade or two, mine was about making humanity a multi planetary species. And then I began focusing on my current MTP of inspiring guiding entrepreneurs to create a hopeful, compelling and abundant future for humanity. I'm now working into my third MTP which is to add decades of healthy lifespan healthspan onto humans to make 100 years old and use 60. And that's driving a lot of moonshots that I'm taking in this regard. For me, that is some of the attributes I want folks to remember when they're working on their massive transformative purpose. One of the things I did for my abundance 360 community Salim and making it available to the exo community and to folks listening is we created a generative AI model to help people design their MTP. It's available@diamandis.com MTP very simple. Remember, if you want to develop an MTP and I encourage folks to do that, go and play with it. It will take you through a series of conversations and then it will model a number of MTPs and you read them and see what feels right. It's a pretty easy process. And once you have your MTP, there is another tool that folks can get@diamandis.com moonshot I think we have moonshot or moonshots. Both go to the same place and it will help you develop your moonshot. And when you're developing a moonshot, it's like the target you're hoping to hit in 10 years. And I'll show a few images about that, but it's like you probably don't know how to get there. If it's truly a moonshot, it scares you.

By definition you shouldn't know how to get there.

Yeah, it scares you and it, it's something which is pretty out there and therefore becomes a difficult objective. You want to talk about moonshots a little bit?

I do. And just MTP in general.

Let's Finish up on MTP and we'll go to moonshots a little bit.

There's a huge sea change going and it's the same tectonic shift between scarcity and abundance. If you take education, all of our education for several hundred years has been supply side driven. I'm going to develop the right skill set, accounting, doctor, lawyer, engineer, whatever. And then you go to the job marketplace and sell those skills in the job marketplace. And that's how all of our education systems have built is a push model. Get your skills, push them into the world. And now we're seeing things shift with the, with the MTP type concept and other things as to what problem do you want to solve and then go acquire the learning and skill, skills and techniques and capability to solve that problem. And we're shifting from the supply side to the demand side and we're going to see our entire educational systems now transform based on what fundamental problem do you want to solve? So this goes way past just company building to a sea change and what motivates society, I think in a broader way.

Yeah, I agree. I mean, listen, I. What I hope we have boys the same age. Full disclosure. Salim is godfather to my two boys, Jet and Dax, who are 11, turning 12. And your son Milan is the same. And what I want for them more than anything is to be clear about their purpose in life. Not my purpose, not their mom's, not what their teachers tell them, but to find something. Because when you've got that purpose and it can be anything, it could be a YouTuber, it could be a gamer, it could be whatever it is, when you have that purpose, it drives this self learning desire which is extraordinary.

It's so great to have that gap. You know, I went to engineering school because my dad's an engineer.

Yeah. I went to medical school because my dad's a doctor. Yeah.

And then two years later I crashed out of engineering. They literally kicked me out and said don't come back. Thank God. And I think now for this new generation, they can grow up truly looking at what speaks to them and uncluttered from some of the stuff in the past. And I think if parents can give their kids that gift of just literally letting the child figure out and discover who they want to be and what MTP they want to operate on, I think it'll be very powerful.

Yeah. So I want people to realize you can have a massive transformative purpose for yourself, for your family or family office, for your company, even for your country. Right. So I was meeting with the prime Minister of Greece and saying, you know, Greece needs to reinvent how the world sees it. Not just olive oil and shipping and summer vacations. Right. So you know, or you know, something from 2,000 years ago. So what is the massive transformative purpose a nation wants to have?

I talked, I was talking to one of the ministers in Greece and I said, listen, you were the birthplace of education, civics, democracy, et cetera. It's time to take on that mantle again and reinvent all of that for this new millennium because we need it reinvented. So that's what I threw out there.

Okay, great. I think it should be the center of the advance in health care. But anyway, it's good. Blue zone. So going back, I mean, an MTP is fundamental. In fact, I require all of the CEOs that I mentor and support inside of. The Abundance360 community need to have an MTP and a moonshot. We do workshops on that before folks come to our five day summit so that they're seeing every. I mean, there's such a deluge of information. Unless you're clear about what to cherry pick, right. What your eyes and ears are looking for, then you'll be overloaded. Anything else on mtp? Before I talk a little about moonshots.

I want to mention the business value here, please. So when we wrote EXO version 1 in late 2014, a year later, Paul Polman, who was then CEO of Unilever, pinged me and he goes, hey, I want you to come in. And he had me come and speak to his top 200 executives. And after that, they basically ordered every brand in Unilever to take on an MTP and be purpose driven across the board. Four years later, Keith Weed, the cmo, does a presentation and demonstrates that the five most profitable brands in Unilever are the ones that adopted it the most. So we're starting to see the model bite because there's a clear business heuristic when you can say to your user base, your customer base, your fan base, that this is the problem I'm about. It engages them in an incredibly powerful way. So it's not just for your company, but it engages your community and it attracts the crowd. And we'll talk a little bit more about that as we get into that. But it's absolutely critical for company to take that on.

I love that. Right. And also inspires your employees to work harder. It's like, I'm not just working to make another buck, I'm working to make the world a better place. And you can't you can't buy that level of energy from your employees. And, and also, you know, when there are so many products out there that, you know, marketing is trying to differentiate them by brand, color and so forth, having an MTP and like, when I'm buying this product, I'm making the world a better place.

So let's look at Moonshots and then we'll cover off this one.

Yeah, something really exciting happens when you start talking about moonshots. First of all, Moonshots truly got developed beautifully inside of Google, inside of what's called Google X. And Astro Teller, who's the captain of moonshots, I love his title, defines a moonshot in the following way. It's a huge business opportunity and intersecting with new exponential technologies and a crazy idea that would be 10x. Your company moonshot is not going a little bit faster as Astro talks about. It's not a car that gets 50 miles per gallon, getting 55 miles per gallon. You can get 55, 10% more by working harder, little better aerodynamics or a little better tires, whatever the case might be. But if you want to go from 50 miles to 500 miles per gallon, and I know I'm talking about gas versus electric here, you need to reinvent your entire car. You can't get there incrementally. And it needs new exponential technologies and it's a massive opportunity. So what we're looking for in your moonshot again is this intersection, huge business opportunity, new exponential tech, a 10x, not 10%. And so the realization as well is that moonshots take a while here. The Apollo program took eight years. The XPRIZE competition, this is where I jokingly say it's overnight success after 11 years. SpaceX for its first launch took seven years. The Tesla Roadster is five years. Google's autonomous cars, 13 years and climbing. It's not easy. You're committing for a while, but the value is huge. And these come from Astroteller. We talk about them in our book EXO 2.0, that most of the world is working on 10% improvement. I'm really happy if my profits are up 10%. My revenues, my customer base is up 10%. But when you're working on 10x, which is 1000%, it distinguishes you from everybody else. That's where SpaceX comes in. Compared to the old aerospace industry, as an example, when you try and go 10% bigger, you're in a smartness competition with the world. It's like everyone's trying to eke out a little bit better Product and service. And your team is not going to win statistically against the entire world in the smartness competition. But when you're going 10 times bigger, it gives your team permission to really go after weird and crazy ideas. I like to say the day before something is truly a breakthrough. It's a crazy idea. So where are you trying crazy ideas in your organization? Anything you want to comment on either of those?

Yeah, no, I think this is absolutely dead on. When you look at major breakthroughs throughout history, it always comes from crossing two very disparate areas, Right? And it never comes from the 10% objective. It comes from saying, let's see if we can do this with this, and being really nuts. And that's where every single major breakthrough in history has come from. And so you have to do this in order to operate successfully in the world that's coming.

Hey, everybody, it's Peter. I want to take a break from our episode to talk about a health product that I love. It was a few years ago. I went looking for the best nutritional green drink on the market. So I went to Whole Foods and I started looking around. I found three shelves filled with options. I looked at the labels and they really didn't wow me. So I picked the top three that I thought looked decent, brought them home, tried them, and they sucked. First of all, they tasted awful. And then second, nutritional facts actually weren't very impressive. It was then that I found a product called AG1 by Athletic Greens. And without any kind of question, Athletic Greens is the best on the market by a huge margin. First of all, it actually tastes amazing. And second, if you look at the ingredients, 75 high quality ingredients that deliver nutrient dense antioxidants, multivitamins, pre and probiotics, immune support, adaptogens. I personally utilize AG1 literally every day. I travel with an individual package in my backpack, sometimes in my back pocket, and I count on it for, you know, gut health, immunity, energy digestion, neural support, and really healthy aging. So if you want to take ownership of your health, today is a good day to start. Athletic Greens is giving you a free one year supply of vitamin D and five of these travel packs with your first purchase. So go to athleticgreens.com backslash moonshots. That's athleticgreens.com moonshots. Check it out. You'll thank me. Without question. This is the best green drink product, the most nutritious, the most flavorful I found. All right, let's go back to the episode. The third attribute of why Moonshots matter. You know, when you're shooting for 10 times or 1,000% versus 10% growth. There's a perspective change, right? I use the example of, you know, going from 50 miles per gallon to 500 miles per gallon. There's no way to get there incrementally. You have to start with car, a clean sheet of paper. When Elon says we're going to Mars, there's no way to have gotten there with a partially reusable Falcon 9. It required a completely reusable starship. When you allow yourself that perspective change, you can try a radically different approach. It's a perspective shift and it actually is cheaper than trying to be smarter. And finally, here, and I love this, when you attack a problem as though it were solvable, even if you don't know how, you'll be shocked at what you come up with.

I mean, this is the idea. If you shoot for the stars and you end up with the moon, nobody's going to complain, right? You're going to make a massive difference by accident somehow because you've at least gone for it full on. And you'll uncover things along the way that you never thought existed. I think it's really critical to show the incredible experience change that comes from solving a moonshot, right? It's. There's a completely different characteristic to it. Can I show you a slide?

Yeah, of course. Happy?

All right, let me show you my, my personal kind of crazy experience of this, which was a few years ago. I took a Tesla and I drove from Miami up to Toronto and I'd stop at the charging stations and at the time, the car drove itself about 35% of the time on autonomous driving mode. Construction or road cones would confuse it, etc. And it was a fun trip and so on. Then 18 months later, I drove it back. And so there's the relative. I was slightly more clever on the way back, but look at that bottom row, right? Drove it up 35% of the time. When I drove it back, same car, same sensors, is driving itself 80% of the time.

Amazing.

Like, it's like Moore's Law in live action. And that's just better data, better analytics, that many more cars, better off the roads, etc. But the thing that was really, that really hit me was the incredible transformative nature of this, which was that I got into this car, which was basically a first class train cabin. It carries me across the country 80% of the time by itself. And because the charging stations are free, because of the promo that I got from, I got the car etcetera the entire trip of 2500km cost me zero. It was free. So you'd want to kind of look at the massive difference of buying a combustion engine car and tootling along from places, having to focus on a highway, etc. I get in this thing that carries me across the country for free, and I arrived more refreshed than when I left. Right. And that, I think, is what happens when you go for a moonshot and you can make a radical thing happen. You completely change the experience. Experience for everybody.

To wrap this up Again, exponential organizations 2.0 fundamental to an exo if you're an entrepreneur about to start a company, if you've started a company, if you are running a company, a business owner, the very first step is, what the hell do you stand for? What is your massive transformative purpose that's going to be the focusing of your everything?

Do not start a company without an mtp.

Yeah.

And if I've done seven startups, the four that failed were when I didn't have a clear purpose.

Yeah. All right, buddy. Well, listen, I love my time with you. Excited to be launching Exponential Organizations 2.0 into the world. And, you know, I think for us, this is about helping entrepreneurs make a bigger dent in the universe, helping uplift humanity and do things that matter more than ever. You know, with those MTPs in place and the other 10 attributes, and we'll talk about those in other podcasts, it allows you to take moonshots and make the world a bigger place, a better place. Anyway, as always, awesome. Take care, pal.

All right.