Peter Diamandis on why entrepreneurs need vision plus action, and how to achieve abundance through bold risk-taking. He traces Kodak's collapse to digital photography, recounts winning the Ansari X Prize for spaceflight, and explains his BOLD framework for transformational change.
Questions this video answers
$10 million
October 4, 2004
1976
Acquired for $1 billion with 13 employees (2012)
Chapters
I think an entrepreneur is someone who has a vision of the way the future should be and then actually takes action to make it happen. It's an entrepreneur, someone with a passion and a desire to provide, provide something to people that they want themselves and then go and they make it. When I think back to my childhood, what started me on the, on the path that I'm on was really getting my first passion, which was space flight. I was born during the Apollo era. Star Trek was coming out and it ignited my imagination, what was possible. And I became absolutely passionate. I was a man on a mission to open the space frontier. And when I talk to kids now, I say, listen, the most important thing you have to do more than anything else is find that thing that you're passionate about that you will do day or night, whether someone pays you or not. Because if you have that, you have gold. So when I found my passion for opening up space, and then later on, attacking grand challenges, incentive competitions, exponential technologies, it fuels me, it lights my fire, and it gives me sort of a guiding star to aim at when things don't go well or when things get foggy. I can look and say, that's where I'm going. And it focuses me.
Two years ago, I started on a new journey, which is a project I call Bold. And it is. If abundance is where we're going in the next 20 to 30 years, Bold is the blueprint, the tools on how to get there. It's the notion that today all of us can do what only governments and large corporations used to be able to do. You have the tools in your tool chest to literally take on the world's biggest problems and really take on billion dollar ambitions.
Doing anything big and bold in the world is difficult. It's tough, you know, sometimes you're lucky, but most of the times it's hard work. And to drive drive something different, not incremental, but a transformational change means taking risk. Because the day before something is truly a breakthrough. It's a crazy idea. And if you are trying crazy ideas, a good number of them are going to fail. So ultimately, you have to be ready to embrace risk. Risk to your fortune, risk to your time, risk to reputation. If you want to do big and bold things in the world.
So the year is 1996. Kodak has a $28 billion market cap. It's 140,000 employees. It's 104 years old at this date. And it was in 1996, sorry, 1976, 20 years earlier, that Kodak invented the digital camera. That ultimately puts them out of business. And what happened was the engineer who invented the digital camera explained to his folks what this was going to do, what the potential was. But this first digital camera was only.0.1 megapixels, 0.01 megapixels. And the CEO and the heads of the business looked at this. It's a toy for kids. What do you mean? And we're in the chemicals and paper business, not this digital camera stuff. And so they ignored it. They ignored this. And unfortunately, last year, in 2012, Kodak goes bankrupt. What's interesting though, in that same year, another company, also in the digital imagery business, called Instagram, gets acquired by Facebook for a billion dollars. But with 13 employees. I call this process of going from a linear company being displaced by an exponential one. The new Kodak moment.
I think success ultimately are simple things. It's going to be being a great dad. It is knowing that I am full out, that I am doing everything I possibly can. It's knowing I have a purpose in life and that I am making a headroad towards that purpose. And I do know from my heart of hearts that it is the journey and not the destination.
The first is in fact the x Prize, a $10 million contest that we are organizing here. And this $10 million award will be going to the winner, which is the first team to do the following.
I remember that moment in time when the Ansari X Prize was won. October 4th of 2004. I'd been working on the X Prize for a decade. SpaceShipOne had just made its second flight to 100km. It landed. The prize was over. It had been won. I had, against all the odds, this had been successfully done. And I remember taking a moment to say, how do I feel? How do I feel? How do I feel this 10 year journey is over. What am I feeling in my heart and my soul? And I had the strangest experience. My experience was looking around me and realizing that while I had just journeyed up to the top of this mountain, all I saw around me were higher mountains. And it was the notion that there will always be more and more and more and more things you can do in life. And so don't ever think you're reaching a destination. You know, it is the journey and the experience and the people you go through life with that matter the most.
