Naveen Jain argues entrepreneurs solve big problems by thinking at scale: tackle a $10B problem to generate $1B in returns. He proposes concrete fixes like game-based education that adapts to each student and a $20 diagnostic tablet that brings healthcare to remote areas.
Chapters
All right, so there is not a problem in the world that innovation and entrepreneurship can't solve. So you look at me and saying, what do you know about entrepreneurship? What is an entrepreneur? Who is an entrepreneur? So I say, there are three types of people in the world, people who actually can see the problem, and let's call them human beings, right? And there are some of us who can even find a solution to that problem. And we're going to call them visionaries or even coach, or even consultants. And there are few people in this room who can actually go out and do something about it. And we're going to call them entrepreneurs. Entrepreneurs are the ones who are the problem solvers who just don't see the problem, who just don't come up with a solution, who go out and do something about it. And those are the entrepreneurs we celebrate. So you look back and say, if innovation and entrepreneurship can solve all the problem, why every time we walk, we see a problem and we ask the same question, why is it someone do something about it? Why can't someone do something about this? Here is a big problem, why can't someone do something about it? The question you should be asking is, what is it that I can do about it? What can I do about it to solve this problem? That's an entrepreneurial mindset and that's how you solve a problem. There's not a problem how big a problem it is. I will tell you, it's no easier to build a $100 million company to then build to build a billion dollar company. In fact, I'll argue it's so much easier to build a billion dollar company than to build a hundred million dollar company. You have to think so small, you can't think big when you're trying to build a $100 million company. You got to be saying, why can't we go to the moon? What stops us from going to the moon? What stops us from solving big problems? And never be afraid to say, and my company is profitable and I make money. If you want to make a billion dollars, how do you make a billion dollars? You go out and solve a 10 billion dollar problem. And it so happens that those $10 billion problems happen to be large. Social problems, education, health care, clean water, energy. And imagine that if one of you out there solves a clean water problem for around the world, for billions of people, and if you happen to make a billion dollar, somebody's going to say, look at that greedy entrepreneur. My hat's off to you. So my purpose in life is really simple. Go out and think about the large problems and see how innovation can solve it. And I think a lot of, I think one of the speaker earlier talked about education. Before I go and talk about education, I just want to give you a little bit of background that Peter mentioned. I grew up in India. We actually had no food to eat. We didn't have a place to stay. We moved from place to place to place. And most of my education was done in places where there were no tables, no chairs. You sat on the floor, you wrote on the floor. And despite all that, my sister went on to do a PhD in applied mathematics. My brother had a PhD in computer science and statistics. And I'm the least educated person with engineering from IIT and mba. I came to this country, I came to this country with nothing but $5 in my pocket and with a dream of making something out of my life. And you go back and say, if a person from India who couldn't speak the language had nothing, can go do it. What has happened to that spread of innovation and entrepreneurship in this great country? So I wrote an open letter to the President. Dear Mr. President, let's all work together to bring back the spirit of innovation and entrepreneurship to this our great country. And I gave him the lesson in the history. What made our country so great was because we brought the best and the brightest from around the world, in fact. And then we gave them an opportunity to succeed. So much so we call this a land of opportunity. And you know what we did after that? When these people succeeded, we celebrated their success. And you know what we do today? Every single person who comes to this country gets a degree from Harvard, Stanford. We send them back to their country and say, go create jobs there. If somehow we throw every hurdle in their way for them not to succeed. And if they do succeed, we call them goddamn 1 percenters. We don't say and then we stand up and say, sir, you do not have a right to belong to our society because you are not a 99 percenter. You are 1 percenter. And we are proud to be 99 percenter. Is that the country we belong to? No. Our country says, sir, I want to be just like you, you 1 percenter. So thanks to those 1 percenter, let's all become the 1 percenter. So how are we going to go become that 1 percenter that's going to go out there? Then everybody wants to be like us. We're going to go solve big problems. Let's talk about education. How are we going to solve education problem? Not the way it's done, not the way today people do that. People say the reason our children are not being educated is because the teacher unions, because we don't give enough computer to the kids, and because the poor people can't have education. They don't understand just because poor people have poor education, that's a correlation. That's not the causation. If you go back and look at the history, look at the evolution of human brain, there is nothing that says if you are born poor, you're going to get less education. In fact, if you go back from a neuroscience perspective, what makes the education most effective is not what we do today. So what is the brain good at? Brain is extremely good at pattern matching. Brain is not very good at reading. Brain never had to learn to read because brain is optimized for only two things, survival and procreation. For survival, it never had to learn to read. When we were living in the jungle, nowhere, it said, T, I, G e are coming, run nowhere. So what did brain had to do? Extremely good pattern matching. It sees a yellow color behind the bush, it says time to run. Right? It sees a brown color thing, it says time to run. My lunch is running away, right? Brain is hardwired not to ignore the motion, right? Anytime when I'm talking to you, you can completely tune me out, blah, blah, blah. But the minute I move my hand, there's nothing you can do. You have to look because brain is hardwired for motion. I could tell you all about how you can fundamentally change education system. Because today our education system was not only designed in the industrial era. We teach our children. Just like the industrial conveyor belt. You know what we do? We group them by the date of manufacturing. How old are you? You put them here, you go to the next station, tighten the screw with the physics, go to the next station, we're going to teach you history. And we all group them like that. Just like the industrial conveyor belt. Every one of us learns differently. What if we group them how you learn? If you learn adaptively, you learn conceptually, you learn graphically. Maybe you're good at math, maybe you're good at science. No, sir. We're going to bunch them through the date of manufacturing and we're going to move through the conveyor belt. What if you can come up with an education system that's adaptive, that changes the way you learn? In addition to that, what if we change the system so that as opposed to having the fixed time variable learning, which is six months to learn, and if you Learn nothing, you get A. And if you absolutely didn't even come to the class, you get D and you move on. What if you change that? Instead of fixed time variable learning to fixed learning variable time, that means you have to get equivalent of an A before you can move on. It's no different than a video game. You can't go to the level six until you pass the level five. And it may take you two days, it may take you two months, it may take you two years, but you don't pass, you don't move. So the point is you can go out and change the education system. That's more effective than a private tutor and more addictive than any video game. And it's doable. And I think each one of us has power to do that. As Peter mentioned, we can solve the health care problem as opposed to looking at building the infrastructure. What if you can build a tablet device that Peter talks about and it is sensors? The whole device could be a $20 device that can be given to a village girl that instead of getting abused, she becomes the village doctor. She can diagnose most common diseases in every area. We can impact billions of people's lives. So what is the success? At the end, we all are looking to be successful. The success is not defined by how much money you have in the bank. Success is going to be defined by how many lives can you improve. And if you all want to be successful, think big, think impact. How can we impact billions of people's lives? And if you can all do that, we'll all be successful. You can come back and join the 25k group because that's what makes it all happen. So at the end, all I can say is think like an entrepreneur. There's not a problem in the world that innovation and entrepreneurship can't solve. Thank you. Thank you.
