Lou Pelosi: Hello everybody! Thank you so much for joining us today.
We are very excited to spend the next 45
minutes or an hour with you all.
I'm Lou Pelosi, and I'm the moderator
for this afternoon's session on Radical
Innovation and Audacious Entrepreneurial Thinking.
I'm very happy to be joining you.
I'd like to just first thank the folks that
made this possible, and that's obviously
Tufts University
and the Tufts Entrepreneurship Center, and
I'm also affiliated and part of the Tufts
Entrepreneurship
Network, and they're really the folks
that are helping today.
There's a few folks behind the scenes
too that are working with us to
make this all possible.
I'd just like to extend the thank
you to all of them to make this possible too. Just in the
way of the background of myself, again
Lou Pelosi. I'm the vice president of
Business Development
and Partnerships for On24, a San
Francisco-based, venture-funded
marketing software company, but more
importantly for today, I'm a Tufts
Entrepreneurship Center Board of Advisor
and a long-term Tufts University Alumni
engaged in the community, and we're
fortunate enough to have panelists here
today that fall under that same umbrella.
Just in the way of my experience, I was a Tufts University
BS in Mechanical Engineering, many years ago.
I found myself out here on the West
Coast
at business school and have pretty much
made my career in Silicon Valley
over the last 25 plus years. I've been fortunate
to ride the wave really of two big innovation
activities out here, and that was
broadband
and bringing broadband information into
homes and businesses
and also software as a service enabled
by broadband. The ability to have
software out on the internet or in the cloud as
opposed to installing it on servers
in your offices. I've been again
blessed to have been part of an IPO out here in
in Silicon Valley. I've been with
companies, three of them, that have been
that have been bought. I''ve also had the colossal failure
of a company that couldn't raise its series B and had to shut down. But
today really isn't about my experience or my
history, it's really about our panelists, and we are very, very fortunate
today to have two panelists that have seen a
broad spectrum of innovation,
radical innovation, entrepreneurial
thinking in parts of organizations
that have really moved the needle in
some of the most exciting areas today. So i am going to first
introduce Julie Schoenfeld. Julie
is a serial entrepreneur, she is a
CEO, she's a Founder, she's a board member, 
and currently she's a Entrepreneur in
Residence at CalTech, and we're very excited to
have you as part of this.
Julie, why don't I turn it over to you
for a little bit more detail. Tell us a
little about your journey from Tufts University
to where you sit today.
Julie Schoenfeld: Sure, thanks Lou, and
it's great to meet a fellow
Mechanical Engineer from Tufts.
I graduated in '79 with a BSME,
and when I went to Tufts, I had always
known I wanted to be an entrepreneur, but
I thought by going to engineering school
I would learn something about the basic
technologies,
so that I could form companies around
those technologies.
What I didn't consider was that
engineering school gave me a very
different foundation,
and that foundation was the ability to
solve problems. I remember sitting in the
Library of Engineering,
Anderson Hall at the time, just
with problem sets, one after another
after another, and I didn't know that I
was actually training to become an entrepreneur, so
it was a great education for many
reasons, not the least of which was the
technical education, but the
problem-solving skills is really what I got.
So from when i graduated from Tufts, I
joined Procter & Gamble's manufacturing
management program, where I really learned how to
make things and how to manage people who make things,
and from there I decided that I wanted to go back in
and get my MBA. I went to Harvard,
and when i was at Harvard, I knew that I
wanted to run my own business, 
so I looked around and I said, "Okay, what
is the job everybody wants in order to be able to be ready to do
their own startup?" And at the time the
job was to become a product manager at
Hewlett Packard. Now in those days,
Hewlett Packard was the job to get.
Nowadays, it's Google, Google and Facebook.
And so I got that job, spent that time
earning my stripes at Hewlett Packard,
launched a number of products,
saw some radical innovation, and how
network computing was going on and
network management was going on,
and then from there, I took a number of
jobs with different companies, both small
and large, and what I wound up doing was really
playing every position. I was in charge of sales, I was in
charge of marketing, I was in charge of
operations,
and what it gave me was a bit of a
foundation.
But it wasn't until i was 15 years into
my career that I actually
started running businesses, which is
kind of late
to be perfectly honest. But I did start my first
business in 1997. It was a chat product
for
on the Web, and it was the 1.0, go, go, go go years of the
internet, and we got off the ground
and within 18 months my company went from
zero to being acquired for over 300
million by
Ask Jeeves, which was a search engine
at the time.
And speaking of radical innovation,
when all the tools for the internet came out
there was a radical innovation shift, and
it was interesting to be there at the
beginning.
Nobody really knew that search engines
were going to rule the world, and it
really wasn't until Google came up with
a better product and a better value proposition which was
"We're going to organize the world's data."
They weren't just a search engine,
they had a bigger vision, and that's one
of the lessons on radical innovation.
Anyway from there, after selling that business to Ask, I went on
create an optical components business
called OEWaves, and it spun out of
CalTech, and it's located in Pasadena. Then I did a
company called Perfect Market, which
was trying to help
traditional publishers, like the LA
Times and the Tribune Corporation,
make more money online, so that was an ad tech play,
another radical innovation. That
company was acquired by Taboola, which is
a company many of you may know of today.
And then, after that I started a
business called Strobe, which created Lidar,
which is a sensor that goes on a
self-driving car.
That company, Strobe, was acquired by Cruise General Motors
in 2017, and when i left Cruise
last summer, I then stepped in to become
the Entrepreneur in Residence at CalTech
and work with some of the greatest
innovators on the planet to help them
bring their products to market.
Lou Pelosi: Wow, thank you, thanks Julie. Thanks for that
great introduction, a great breadth of
experience that we'll be able to share
with the audience as we get into our
moderated Q and A session. Without
further ado, our second panelist today is David Jen.
David is with X, the Moonshot Factory. Some
people know them by their formal name, Google X. Another tremendous
journey since Tufts University. Welcome
David,
provide a little bit of background on
how you find yourself
here in Silicon Valley today and your journey from Tufts.
David Jen: Sure, thanks Lou for organizing this. I think this is going to be super fun,
and i'm happy to be here. So a quick introduction
of myself, like Lou said I'm David,
and I'm here mainly because I lucked out
into a super interesting job, 
right? I say this because I get to
work at a moonshot factory,
called X. Also like Lou said,
some of you might know us by our
previous name, we used to be called
Google X.
But despite the name change, we still
have the same mission. Our goal is to
develop
and apply radical technologies and use
them to solve big problems.
And by big problems, we're generally
looking at global scale problems.
So you might have heard of Alphabet's
big bets in self-driving cars,
internet balloons, autonomous drone
delivery,
and contact lenses that could monitor
diabetes.
Those all at one point kind of sounded
like science fiction, but
now they're all real companies at
Alphabet, and they all started at
X. So despite how cool the projects
sound, and I'm happy to talk about all the
projects, the real meta mission of x,
the real thing that we're really working on
is we're trying to make innovation reproducible.
That's actually why we call ourselves
a factory. Our new name is X, the Moonshot
Factory. So at X, we're trying to lay the
infrastructure, and we're trying to build a culture
that allows us to repeatedly generate innovations
that have impact on the world. In essence,
we're trying to bottle
the a-ha moment that a lot of entrepreneurs get
kind of outside of Alphabet. This is
actually where I spend a ton
of my time, and that's why I'm really
glad to be here today because I think
innovation is such an important thing to
talk about,
whether you're at Google, or outside
starting your own company, or even in any
other big company.
So at X, I have two jobs, one paycheck.
So I lead our finance team, and I also lead
our investments team. So what this means is
number one, first and foremost, I work
with our CEO
every day. I help him analyze, 
green light, and fund
projects. The other thing I do is I run
operational finance,
and a big part of that job is I spend my
time recruiting,
training, and mentoring the future CFOs
for our portfolio company.
So X has been around for about 10 years,
and I've been lucky to be there for
about seven, and in that time I've learned a ton I
think about what it's like to work and create
innovative companies.
We always say we work on things that are
kind of on the edge of impossible.
It took a real mental shift though for
me to really find my groove at X.
When I first got to X, it just seemed
like a really weird place, and
that's in-part because it is actually a
really weird place.
But it was doubly true for someone like
me who came from
a finance background. So if you read
my bio,
you'd see that I came from a pretty
traditional background. So after Tufts, I
I worked at JP Morgan, I worked at a Big
Five consulting company, I went to
business school, 
and in my time in my career, I feel like
I definitely developed a theory for how to be successful at
work. I think a lot of you guys
on the call might have this. It's like a
little hack that you develop so you can
be on autopilot, right?
For me that was you know, you work
really hard,
right? You pull your all-nighters at the
investment bank,
you manage risk, which basically means
you can't ever really fail,
and it leads to good things. You get
promoted, or you land that next big job
that you want. These frameworks that I picked up,
they totally failed me when i got to X.
They really just didn't work inside of a
moonshot factory,
so since then I've become a big
proponent to something that we call
Moonshot Thinking, and the idea is if you
want to build 10x
businesses, and by that i mean businesses
that are aiming to make things 10 times
better, you need to really embrace a
culture that has the guts and the audacity to
try and reach for big things. So I'd actually...
We have actually a really simple process,
you know, we believe that you start with the
hardest part of the problem, 
you run small experiments, you engage
with the real world, as fast as possible,
but the hard part about our process is
you have to be totally okay with it
failing because we know that we learn
from our mistakes,
and when you actually find something
that works when you're going after a
really, really big problem,
the outcomes could be really, really
outsized. They can be huge.
Ao Lou, I could talk about this
honestly forever. I'm really glad to be
here and instead of like rambling on for a
long time, I'm just going to turn it back
to you. Thank you for having me.
Lou Pelosi: Absolutely, absolutely. Thanks very much for the background, Julie and David, and
let's just jump back... 
Let's jump into the main matter today,
and that's radical innovation.
We are not talking about innovation
where you're trying to get ten percent
more market share or five percent more
mind share. We're talking about big,
huge
quantum leaps in the marketplace, and I
think
for everyone today... I'd love David to
maybe direct it to you first on what's
your definition of radical innovation?
And perhaps maybe you can share
how you think about it from a process
and what
X thinks about when they think about
radical innovation.
David Jen: Yeah, that's a great question, right Lou, so
we don't really necessarily
have a focus area like a lot of
[inaudible] would, so our goal is to create breakthrough
technologies and use them to solve big problems, right?
We want to impact
billions of people in a positive way.
Our other goal is to build large
sustainable businesses. That's what we're
here to do.
What we tend to look for is the
intersection of three things:
so number one, we want to make sure we're
going after a huge problem;
number two, we want to make sure we can
take a different perspective
on that problem and come up with a
radical solution;
and number three, because we're a tech
company, we want to
use a breakthrough technology that we
can develop or at least [inaudible]
to get the job done. That's
why we actually don't work on technology
for the sake of technology,
right? We don't like interesting ideas
that don't have a real world application.
We're looking to, kind of, solve big
problems and build big companies.
An example of something that we're
working on right now that i feel like
hits all of these categories, 
that i'm really excited about, is we have
an agricultural one shot
right now. The big problem, right,
is that humanity will very soon be 10
billion people.
And it's going to be increasingly hard
to feed 10 billion people
in a productive and sustainable way.
The radical solution that we're going
after is something that we call
computational agriculture. So kind of the
a-ha moment we came up with is
the tools that farmers are using today,
they're really offshoots and like improvements on top
of industrial era tools, and we think we can make that
better.
The radical technology, the breakthrough
technology we're using is we're trying to convene
breakthroughs in machine learning,
sensors, robots because we love robots,
satellites to help farmers make better
and healthier decisions about their
crops.
And a cool example of something that
we're doing here is that
we created these prototype
plant buggies... We can call them a robot
if you want.
They, right now, roll up and down giant
fields, hectares and hectares of farmland,
somewhere in North America,
and they're taking pictures and
collecting data on every plant in that
field.
And the reason why we're doing that is
we're trying to
design a system where we can help
farmers make better
and smarter decisions about the
crops in their fields. So, for example, if
a plant has a bug problem, you don't need to
spray the whole field with pesticides,
right? You could just go after and
intervene in that one plant, 
and this is like a really great example
of something that we're working because
it hits on all three of those areas.
Lou Pelosi: Fantastic, thank you David. Julie, anything
to add from your perspective? What's
radical innovation?
You know, when you see it how do you
know it, and
how do you determine what areas you
want to get involved in?
Julie Schoenfeld: Right, so Lou when you asked me to be on this panel, the first thing I
did was I looked up "what's the
definition of radical innovation", and
what i discovered is there really is no real definition.
Everybody has a slightly different take on it, but what I
think my best view of what radical
innovation
is that anything that's introduced
into the marketplace
that disrupts the way it was being done
before to the point where whatever was
being done before isn't done that way
anymore.
And i think it lives on a continuum. I think,
you know, if you think back to 
railroads being supplanted by
other transportation forms, if the
railroads thought themselves as a
transportation industry, they might have
been able to
radically innovate along the way and
become a different kind of company. Just
like Google didn't see themselves as a
search engine business, they saw
themselves as organizing the world's
data. So it's something that would change
the industry in total. And so you know i was thinking
about Uber as an example,
as a company that changed the way people
transport around the world. And there really wasn't that much
innovation in the technology itself.
It utilized new technologies that had
come online like GPS
and the ability to use the cell phone to
be able to call a car, so you displace
the dispatcher.
But it was the combination of all these
technologies that had emerged,
on top of having a very compelling
entrepreneur
who was willing to fight all the legal
barriers.
So i consider Uber as having been a
radical innovation without
it having, you know, without it being what
you think of as typically technical in
nature. But as i'm at CalTech, I see things that
would probably fall more carefully into a radical
innovation framework. There's an awful lot of
biological work going on at CalTech.
There's a lot going on
with genomics and synthetic biology
in changing the way our health care
system and our medical treatments will
work in the future.
So I consider those enormous
radical innovations,
but what I'd like to say, since I'm an
entrepreneur, and I come at this from,
okay, in order to introduce something
enormous to the world like computational
agriculture,
that takes the deep pockets of a company
like Google. What can an entrepreneur do
in that?
And the beauty of radical innovation
is that, it's the rising tide raises
all boats. So David mentioned sensors.
Well, you know, there is a couple of
drone activities going on at Cal Tech
that will potentially help precision
agriculture in ways that were not useful
before. So small companies can hang around at the
rim and watch what companies like Google are
doing, and then bring
smaller innovations that add to the
total piece of the pie. 
Much like what i did with my Lidar
company being acquired by Cruise General Motors. It was a sensor that's important
for the self-driving car, it wasn't the
complete system,
but it was a piece of the radical
innovation.
Lou Pelosi: And Julie, employees... Tell me a little bit about
what company employee traits are
important
to be able to develop or promote or
foster, so that you can have a mindset
of doing something big.
Julie Schoenfeld: Right. So i'm dying to hear David's answer on
this one. But it's definitely
the mindset of optimism, you know?
You have... So there's two things, one is being on the team, and it's
leading the team. So
what i will say is you have to have a
compelling leader in order to drive radical innovation.
Generally it takes a long time. These
bets are not
a two-year bet. These are... you're in it
for the long haul.
And a leader needs to keep the team
engaged and motivated and
keeping going. So you have to have a
leader who has the ability not only to
sell their ideas to the market, but also
to the employees, so it's somebody
who's passion and drive
and persistence will
keep everybody engaged. You also have to
have the ability to see the future,
and, you know, we talk about, okay,
here's a problem that we're going to
solve. What is the likely way this is
going to get solved? And being able to
see into the future
and seeing the near-term milestones
that's a real skill that you need to
have.
You also have to have unrelenting
tenacity.
I'd say if i have one skill that
has helped me through not only
engineering school, but all through my
career, it's just
I will not give up. And i think that
anybody who's
been part of a radical innovation knows
what i'm talking about.
You see many things, you know, a thousand
ways that don't work,
until you get to the successful way.
And tenacity is
really one of the number one qualities
that I see as critical
for the mindset. 
As an entrepreneur, you know, we're
used to risk, you know, if you... If you actually... I'm
thinking about, David when you were an
investment banker, you managed risk very
carefully. Finally, after my third startup, I started
looking at, you know, the statistics
of what it takes to have a successful
startup, and I was just thinking Ido not
manage
risk at all. I'm, you know, I'm way too
optimistic,
way too driven, and way too tenacious. 
If i were actually rational, I probably
would have done something different in
my career.
Lou Pelosi: And maybe on that, David, 
love to hear your thoughts:
company characteristics, employee
characteristics. And i just want to let
everyone know that's participating in the
audience. There is a Q and A button. We've
already gotten a number of questions, and we'll start
feathering in those questions, and
hopefully we have the opportunity to
address them all. But David, back to you, a little
bit about the traits?
David Jen: Yeah, you know, I was thinking Julie to
your answer. Iagree with everything you say, and
I wouldn't say you you didn't manage
risk.
I would say that you took a one on one
bet
on yourself, and i think that's the right
thing for an entrepreneur to do.
The thing that i would add to that,
not very much, is i think that the most
important trait that I
search for when i'm hiring a leader
at X or or even, kind of, like a right out
of
grad school type person is I look for
someone who is brave,
right? Like I was just joking with
a panelist earlier today about my son.
My son is turning three at the end of
the year, and
he might actually be like the perfect
entrepreneur
because he's constantly running these
like little experiments,
whether it's like sticking his hand in
something or jumping off something.
And he's not been trained, like the
rest of us, that
failing is bad. He's not afraid of that yet.
He might cry for a bit, and sometimes
for a lot longer than a bit.
But he moves on really quickly, and he'll just try something again, right?
So at X what we try to do is we try
to bring this child-like spirit to our
day-to-day because
we're really trying to build a place
that's great for entrepreneurship,
right? So what we want to do is we want
to dream like little kids, and we want to make sure we test and we look at things like adults and as
scientists, right? And i think, Julie, that goes to a
lot of what you were saying earlier,
so that's why we go after the hardest
part of the problem. We come up with like
a ton of theories for what can solve the
problem. We develop a lot of small little
experiments to test out our theory
because
even though, as you say, Julie, we have
deep pockets, you know, we have
big ambitions too. We want to go after a
lot of things, and we can't waste our
time. That's like the most important part,
right?
So if we fail, we just move on. We
learn, and we hope we don't make the same
mistake again. But if we don't fail,
then we move on to that next set of
experiments, and we run it again,
maybe with a little bit more money, a
little bit more time,
and see how that goes. And what I
would say
about X is, you know, some companies say
they're okay
with failure. X really takes this to
another level.
I still remember, it was like the
weirdest thing,
when i first got to X like seven years
ago, the CEO at the time
was an [inaudible] guy. He asked me
to give a spot bonus to someone who shut
down their own project. Another way of putting exactly what I
just said is somebody failed at their job, and then we
paid that person a spot bonus, right? That goes like totally contrary to
to the way that a lot of Silicon Valley
is geared, right?
If you go to Andreessen Horowitz, Excel,
any of these big
venture capital companies here in the
Bay Area,
you only see posters for the winners, 
like Uber,
like Lyft, like Google, you know, Microsoft,
whatever.
But at X, you might actually see a
poster for
something we shut down, and the reason why we're okay
with that is because
we know that the people working on the
project, they're gonna know the most about that.
Like, they're like Julie, they're taking
that one to one bet,
right? And we don't want them to waste
their time, or their energy, or my money
on on this, and, you know, it's very
easy for us to sleepwalk off
a cliff and and invest like millions of
dollars into something before we realize
that we can't do it. So that's why we
want to build a place where people can
be brave. They can step up and just say like, look
this is not gonna work out,
and I'm gonna move on to something else.
And that's why i think, in addition to
being tenacious, you have to like
dispassionately assess what is and isn't
possible, and like not fall in love with a
solution you have, necessarily, but
really just find the next thing that
might solve that problem.
Lou Pelosi: You know, obviously this topic about
characteristics of the company
and people has hit a nerve because
we've had seven or eight questions that
came in already,
and I think you've addressed a couple of
them.
Stephen specifically asks, you know, how
do you as a company,
you know, try to build this culture that
failure doesn't
matter? What happens when the project
isn't going the right way,
it can't get funding, and do the people
feel like a failure,
you know, the people that are involved, right?
How does that work?
David Jen: Yeah, that's a really good question. You
know, I think that if i were to say... At
X like, we celebrate the failure,
we celebrate it as much as we celebrate
the success, right? For us it's all about the process.
And the way I look at it is nobody wants to
spend their time working on something they know is not
going to work, and that happens a lot, right? Like
you know, we have this weird story at X, it's called the
Monkey and the Pedestal. It's really weird, I'll get into it in a second, but
basically the story goes, someone's
manager
goes up to an engineer and says, "Hey, I
want you to train a monkey
to recite Shakespeare, while standing on
a pedestal."
At most companies, what people will do is they'll
start building the pedestal
because that's the easy thing to do.
When your manager stops by, you can say,
"He, I'm 10%
done today", and you know, next time he
stop by, you can say, "I'm 30%
done, give me a promotion!" Right? But
the real hard thing is
like training the monkey to recite
Shakespeare, and
you know, a quick Google search would
tell you that's impossible,
right? You should move on, you should work on something else. And
we celebrate success, we celebrate
failure, and we celebrate success, but
we celebrate failure because it frees
up your time.
You know, we hire like the best and
the brightest, like a lot of people on
this call, the smartest people in the
room.
And, you know, most of the time they're
going to move on and and find
much more interesting thing,  or we'll
find them much more interesting things,
because the process is actually what we care about.
Lou Pelosi: It may be to Julie, a question to you that came in
came in from Alex. What's the most
important skill to develop as a young
professional to become a leader in an
innovative company
like you have?
Julie Schoenfeld: So I would build on
the the topic that David just hit on,
which is failure,
which is you got to teach yourself how
to fail. And the way I learned how to
fail
was, sort of like... I mentioned early on
that I was playing every position in
bigger companies before I actually
started doing startups.
And at one point in my career, I went
from being the VP of Marketing for a
publicly traded company to being, it's a long story how it happened,
but I wound up being
a sales rep. A bag carrying sales rep for
a software company,
and the job of a sales rep is
that you look at the wall, and you run
at the wall as hard as you can, and
three times you bang into the wall, and
one time, the fourth time,
the door opens. And that's
what the sales job is all about.
But what i learned
from that is that if you can sell a product, you can sell
anything, and when you're an entrepreneur, when
you're doing innovation, when you're
managing a team,
the skill you need is to be able to sell. And, you know, raising venture capital,
they're not buying the company,
they're buying you.
So I would encourage any young person
who's trying to figure out
where they're going to go, and I'm
assuming everybody's a Tufts graduate,
and a wonderful educational background, and
terrific technical chops, which you will
learn
along the way, but this is the one that
nobody talks about.
You know, when you're in a technical
company, in this particular
database company where i was selling, the
engineers called us the Sales Slime.
That's how they felt about
sales people. But if I look back and and I think about
why was I able to have three exits when some of my competitors weren't
even close? Why was i able to raise so
much money from venture capitalists? Why
wasI able to scale my companies? It's because
of the skills i learned by selling.
Lou Pelosi: Excellent, excellent, and David
maybe a question
for you. We talk a lot about broad
ideas and radical innovation to get into
new marketplaces. Brandon asks, "Can you
discuss the role,
limitations, and constraints that play in
developing innovation?" I guess
how do you bound it? How do you know
maybe
what might be too big of an idea? Or how
do you think about
constraints?
David Jen: Yeah, you know, we typically
try not to think about the constraints,
right? If you think about the X process, our
ideas, they can kind of come from
everywhere.
But a lot of times, they start with this
team that we call the rapid evaluation
team. So their job is to come up with like
a thousand new projects every year,
and their other job is to shut down
thousands of their projects,
right? They're really kind of trying to
figure out what's possible and what's not
possible.
So what i would say is instead of
thinking
first about the constrain, what we do
is...
To Julie's point earlier, you know, we'll
think about like,
you know, what is the huge problem, right?
Like self-driving cars,
10 years ago, that's an area that we
really innovated,
and the big problem was that a lot of
people were dying in car accidents.
Now the 10x% solution, Lou, that you were
talking about,
that might be developing a better
seat belt,
you know, better airbags. Because they had
like constraints, right? They're like,
okay, there's a car that's
already built, and someone's already
driving it, 
how do i make it so that it's safer for
those people to drive it? But if you remove the constraint
right, and you go, 
what's the real heart of that problem?
What's the hardest part?
The hardest part is that people are bad
drivers, right? I'm a bad driver, Ithink there's
some of my friends who are on this call that know i'm a bad driver. So as long
as there is going to be a human
in that equation, we're never going to
get to that 10x
solution. So how do we take that person
out of the equation and get to something that's 10 times
better, right? That happened to coincide with
huge breakthroughs
in Lidar technology, in machine vision,
in on-prem computing edge computing, etc. But like the real thing that we did is
we said, "what's the big problem?"
And then we went after different
solutions for like how do we remove that
person, right? We started without any
constraints.
Lou Pelosi: Great, fantastic. You know, I think I'm going to roll more with the audience
questions. They're giving
us their time and energy. I'm gonna try
to see if we can go through a bunch of, a few of those.
And then feather in some of the other topics that
had come up. Maybe,
Julie, to you, Pamela writes,
"when founders leave a company, what
changes?"
Julie Schoenfeld: So it's the founder... It,
again, it depends on the founder. The
founder is generally the person that provides the engine,
you know, to really drive
things forward, and
so a lot of times, the entrepreneurial
juice goes away.
Now, in some companies, when the founder leaves, it's time for scaling to occur,
and many people who have that creative
juice don't have the patience
or the wherewithal to do the
the hard, for some people the hard part
of scaling. So it's very dependent upon the type of
founder. But think about it in terms of someone like
Elon Musk. Elon Musk has become synonymous with
Tesla, he's become synonymous with SpaceX, he's
become synonymous with radical
breakthroughs,
and people have come to trust his vision.
And if he walked away, I do think that
those companies would suffer, and that the
employees wouldn't be able to
see the vision as clearly. You look at
a company like Uber where the founder left, and I think the
jury's out. You know, had he taken it far enough
that somebody who was much more
operationally skilled like the current
CEO can then take it the rest of the way?
I think the best case scenario is
is an example like Google, where the
two founders stayed with the company for
quite a long time. Got it to the point where,
you know, it is juggernaut, in terms of
innovation, technology, ability to do
all kinds of things in the world. So that's kind of a rambling answer.
Hopefully I hit on the points you wanted
to hear.
Lou Pelosi: Absolutely, absolutely, appreciate that, Julie.
You know, David, there's some questions
that are coming in about
how do you pace the company? Are you
going too fast, are you going too slow?
Let me kind of paraphrase a few
of them, but
how do you know when you've made it to a
minimal viable product? How do you know
when it's time to kind of hit the go button versus
we have to do more research? What's going into those
thoughts, as the segments, and the
opportunities,
and the the risks are so big.
Yeah, that's a good question, you know,
we talk a lot about the MVP,  the minimum viable product.
yYou know, I think different people will
have different interpretations of this,
but my personal view is that there really
isn't any such thing as an MVP, right? Like
you're gonna get out there, you're going
to test, and you're going to quickly
learn that whatever you built and you
thought was is the right thing is
probably not the right thing.
And because of this, I really do think
that the two most important parts
of building a product that's innovative
is number one, again going after the
heart of a problem, 
right? That is like go after the monkey,
don't build that pedestal, right? Number two, it's
get out there. Just see what it's like, it
doesn't matter if what you have looks kind
of janky. Let's just see how people
interact and touch and react with it,
right?
Like I said, at X we have that
monkey and the pedestal
story, but we believe that once you
identify the monkey, the big technical
hurdle, 
or the big operational hurdle, spend all
your time going after that. Don't go
after
side things, like the thing you built
doesn't have to look perfect or whatever.
Go after that, and if you feel like you've
gotten over that hurdle, even a
little bit.
The step two in the journey is just
get out there, right? Like see what
it's like in the real world. We have like a story of
something we've been dealing with at X that has to do with real
monkeys. So we have a project
that's designed to bring internet to
the five billion people on the planet
that aren't blessed to have high speed
internet.
And the technology that we're using
is called Free Space Optic.
Think about it as like a laser beam of
light that goes from one terminal to
another terminal,
that beams super high speed internet
without the need of a wire.
So we we got the technology to work,
we overcame what we thought was the
monkey,
and we started testing in India with
a partner.
And we really quickly came to realize
that we had to put them up on these
super high power poles, and there are these
monkeys that called the poles home, and apparently
they were super territorial, and they kept on like breaking our
devices or very much threatening the people
putting up... The poor engineers putting up the
terminal, so we have to engineer our way around
that, right? Now that's the funny
story, but like
the reality of it is that like that is
something we could never have figured
out, if we just stayed in our lab, right? If we
had stayed in the office. We needed to get out
there, and we figured out
kind of a cooler engineering way to
solve that.
Lou Pelosi: Yeah, and it's really great when you
bring up examples of the projects you're
working
on or had worked on.
You've got this minimal viable product,
you've decided that you've met the... The opportunity is there to go ahead
and launch, and then you have this whole issue of
scale, and how to invest in scale, how to think
about scale. Maybe Julie, you've
been a part of a number of successful
organizations that,
you know, sometimes you think you've got
the breakthrough technology, and that's
all it takes.
Can you touch base a little bit about
thinking about scale?
Julie Schoenfeld: Well, so the good thing about all these questions, they're all kind of
dovetailing together, and building on what David says,
you're not ready to scale until somebody
really wants it, and you know that they
want this product, or
whatever the intended use is really how
it's going to work. And when I
started out at Hewlett Packard,
the way
we would figure out the minimum viable
product was we would go
to the, pretty much the next bench, and
ask the engineers,
"what does this product need to be for
you?" And so
at that time we never really learned
the lesson that you need to get out, put
it out there in the marketplace,
put it in front of the intended user,
give it some time in the marketplace. So I am a big, big,
big proponent of getting it in front of people as fast
as possible. So that's sort of just reiterating what David
was saying, and, you know, scaling...
Having just spent some time at
general motors, who
are, you know, arguably one of the
greatest manufacturing
entities in the world. They have making cars cheaply down
to a science. They have the volume, they
have the processes, they have the
procedures,
and the issue is how do you get from
A to B, how do you cross that chasm? Or when
you get the innovation ready, so that now you can
throw it over the bench and have it
become manufacturable. You don't really
want to go there, until you've
made that monkey recite Shakespeare,
and I think I would just want to reiterate
David's point again and again.
Lou Pelosi: Super. David, any thoughts about scale?
And some of the the ventures you're
involved in, the scale is phenomenal
just to think about, but how do you go from the start to where
you want to be?
David Jen: Yeah i would just add on to what Julie said earlier.
You know, like, I think that one of the
great things that
we can do at X that might be different
than other places
is that we can we can separate
innovation and scale a little bit.
Because i think there needs to be some
space,
right, like, to really think differently.
If you really think back to the history
of Google,
our founders have always been really
interested
in innovation, right? So, you know, act one of innovation at Google
was what we call
20% time. That's like become pretty
famous in Silicon Valley.
Where every engineer could spend a day
of the week, about 20% of his or
her time
working on something outside of core,
outside of the scale part of their job.
If i really think about it, Google X
is really kind of step two
of that innovation journey, where
we started creating actual physical
distance,
right? Now we had a group of people who
are designed to really think about
innovation really deeply. And
now that we're Alphabet, right? We're now a family of
companies,
so if you think about it, we've created
legal entities separation, right? The great thing
about all this for me
is that people who are really good at
the innovation part can focus on the
innovation part.
And then we can hire some of the best
people in the world in supply chain, and
scale, and sales,
etc. to take the project on to their next
level. So we really believe that like
it's really important for us to find the
kind of the right group of people,
and they might not even be at X, right,
or Google even, or at Alphabet, right,
to take the project on to do the thing that
it's meant to do.
Lou Pelosi: Excellent, thanks David. There's
another question here. I think, Julie, I'll
address it to you because it's
something that we touched based on
prior to the call, when we had our
introductory meeting and it's
this idea of how do you know if you failed
or if it's just a bump in the road. And it
got me thinking about our conversation
about... Careers are long and sometimes
things happen that you don't expect and
a failure
doesn't look like that over time. Maybe
you can talk a little bit about that.
Julie Schoenfeld: Well, you know, as an entrepreneur, I think it's a lot easier to know when you
failed because, you know, your resources are very
constrained and, they're very finite, and so running
out of money is one of the surest sign of failure.
But, you know, and I was just sitting
here listening to David misty-eyed over
people celebrating when you failed
because because I can tell you that
venture capitalists do not treat you like that when you
do fail. So, yes, failure... Failure when your
resources are limited is a lot more devastating
to you and your team than when you are at a
a large company. That said, when you hit a failure, I have
never myself personally experienced a failure
that didn't bring me to a greater place, and
when I first did my first startup back in
the first internet days, I had already 15-20 years of
business experience under my belt, and I
was looking at these young
whippersnappers coming along who just
graduated from school, and I thought,
"How do they... How are they so articulate?
How do they know so much?" It took me
this many years to get to that level. And
then we hit that first internet.bomb
crash, and that's when I learned what
failure is really about is that I had
experienced
so many different things. I had so many
tools in my toolbox.
And I hit a point after the
the crash of one market that I just
couldn't raise any more money, so I
figured out
how to raise money using government
grants.
And so then I wound up funding a
company for many, many years
and still building my technology by utilizing
SBIRS. These are government small
business innovation research grants.
And I discovered that the odds of
raising money from an SBIR were like 25%.
You know, if a hundred people apply, 25
might get it. Whereas with a VC, it's about one in
a hundred. So every failure delivers a new lesson,
and those lessons eventually come together
and allow you to be even better in the long run.
Lou Pelosi: Super, thank you. You know, a couple of other questions that are coming in...
This one, kind of a specific question, but
Stacia writes, "Do either of you see any benefits or pitfalls for social
entrepreneurs to bridge tech companies and public private
entities, as a SAS provider?" That that might be...
David, I don't know how much
social entrepreneurship, your thoughts?
I know a lot of what X does often thinks about
social, addressing social problems. Let
me just kind of see if you have
something for that.
David Jen: Yeah, I don't know I fully understand
the question, but, you know, we believe in
prospect and purpose, right? Like we want to
make sure that, on the one hand,
we're working on something that can
really positively impact
a lot of people, right, and we believe
that if we do that, we should be able to find a way to
turn it into a sustainable business. I wouldn't separate those two
things too much. Like I believe there's a purely
social company, right? But like I really
do believe that if you want to really
create
like big time change, like global scale
change, even country level
change, like my personal view of it is that
you need to make sure that you're
building a sustainable business
that can be profitable, and it's
commercial and can run
on its own. Otherwise you're always
dependent on other people
to provide you with the funding needed to
really drive the change that you're
trying to drive.
Lou Pelosi: Okay, all right, thanks, thank you for that.
Julie, kind of another question
is around unintended consequences
and kind of things you can't possibly
think about in your business planning
and your brainstorming and.. Any thoughts around
that, any examples around that on how
that may
impact innovation, and how you as an
entrepreneur--
and in many of these cases
intrapreneurship, we're talking about the
ability to be innovative in a larger
company.
Julie Schoenfeld: Well, you know, this is such an
interesting question because
when you're trying to solve a problem,
for example, when you're trying to create
a self-driving car and your first
mission is to get the human out of the
car because that's the least
safe element of the car itself,
you don't think, "Okay, what other
industries would I impact by doing that?"
So, for example, you know,
there was a show on 60 minutes last
night about the self-driving truck, and
then the teamsters are on there talking
about they're going to
get rid of all the drivers and lose all
the jobs. So there's an unintended
consequence of a self-driving truck, as an example.
The other thing is that self-driving
cars could up end the
auto insurance industry because if the
cars are that safe,
they can be self-insured, or
they can be insured by the owner of the
car itself, as opposed to
the auto insurance industry. Nobody
thinks about that when you're building a
self-driving car, you're just worried
about how do you keep from hitting the
things on the road and hitting
the cars in front of you.
Another one that, you know, I sadly and
horrifically participated in, when I did a company
called Perfect Market, is we created a capability, and Google,
you do this too, where we realized that if you were
searching for something
that you were interested in, then i could
give you some more content,
that's just like what you just read, that
might be more interesting to you. So we were trying to keep, for
publishers, more people on the site
longer,
so if you're reading a story about say
a certain kind of retirement income, then
I keep feeding you stories on retirement
income.
And what the unintended consequence was is that you're only going to read what
you like, and you're not going to get different
viewpoints, and then that can have
dire consequences in an election, so
there's an unintended consequence. And so I guess what I would just say
is that as you are part of an ecosystem
that's building
a radical new innovation, it's
important to try to step back and say,
"Okay, what could happen here? And is there any
way to prevent it,
if it's bad, or encourage it, if it's good?"
Lou Pelosi: David, a question for you from from Alex. And, you know, we're fortunate, we've
got audiences from young to old,
different backgrounds, different
career aspirations,
and Alex writes, "What do you think
about business school?"
Is it helpful if you want to go out and change the world
and work at, you know, companies like this? Or...
What are your thoughts about that,
having been someone that
went to business school?
David Jen: Yeah, I think that that's a good question. I
think it's a very personal question and depends on your
situation. And I feel like people never like asking
me these types of questions because my answer
is always it depends, it depends on your situation.
You know, the one thing I would be... The one advice I give everyone on my
team that is thinking about going to business
school is, you know, most people are fairly competitive. Like they
want to win. The question that you should ask
yourself is, for these two years, when you're putting
your life on on pause,
right, are you gonna be comfortable
with the fact that like you're gonna see,
you know, blah blah blah from high school
doing really well or whatnot? Because if the answer is
yes, then like, yeah, that investment of
time is worth the return.
If the answer is, "I don't love
that", then I think that, you know, you probably... That's probably
not the right decision for you.
Lou Pelosi: Great, and obviously some of us have, some of us haven't, some of us hired
lots, and Julie, just your thoughts about
that.
Julie Schoenfeld: So I was working at Procter and Gamble, when i got out of Tufts,
and I remember I got, after two years,
I got accepted to Harvard Business
School, and I was on the factory floor
working with a team. We were making laundry detergent, and I...
And Procter and Gamble was a really, really
wonderful company with a wonderful team
spirit, and I remember one of the workers on the,
in the soap factory took me aside and showed
me the math about why it is not worth my
while to go to business school.
And it really, really stuck with me, but
I can say, having had a long career, that
the benefits outweighed the risks or
the benefits outweigh the negatives, and mostly
because of it, not just getting a strong education,
but it was getting exposure. At a school
like Harvard, you do get exposure to
people that are incredible and your
network is second to no one's. So I
always can pick up the phone
and find somebody who can help me
when I need to.
So do not discount the ability, the
network that is created by
strong business schools, and it will
serve you well. In point of fact, we just
had a Zoom call for, you know, I'm like 35 years out of business school, but
a zoom call with my section, just to see how everyone was doing in
the pandemic. And that's how strongly
some schools keep their alumni together.
And so I would recommend it, if you
want to really be an entrepreneur, and
you really need the kind of networking
that a school like HBS gives you.
Lou Pelosi: Super, well, we're coming to the top of the hour.
It's almost been an hour that, again,
we very much appreciate everybody's time.
Let's, let's, the final question from Michael,
you know, we talked about scaling, we
talk about minimal viable product,
and we've got two incredible panelists
that have seen this
from the formation to the execution, but
he asked, "How important is forming the
team,
and how's the ideal team brought
together?" David, why don't we start with
you on that one.
David Jen: I think it's critically important, you know, I think you should always
absolutely write that, like you invest in the entrepreneur, and
you invest in the team. I would say that,
you know, I always tell people that the most important job,
like all the managers that work for me, 
that you have is recruiting, right?
You've got, you have to find the
right people that are going to fit the
culture, they're, you know, they're gonna
bring in a different perspective. I think that's also really important,
you don't wanna hire people just like
yourself,
and I think that anyone who,
you know, like anyone who's super busy,
their natural reaction is gonna be like, "Oh yeah, I'll take that person,
you know, because they're right
there, and they're a warm body, and
I need, you know, someone to help me out
with something." But
when looking back at my personal
failures in my career,
I would say it's not taking the care
to hire people who are smarter than you,
who like to think differently than you, who
are comfortable with failure, right? I think that
is something, that's a trait that's
hard to find
and really taking the time to invest
in finding a team person. So now like
when, you know, I have an open role in my
team, you know,
we'll go out, and we'll look for
like a thousand people
before finding the right person. That's almost the same way as we think
about projects at X
because at X, it's almost like... I would
say like almost everyone, it's like it's gonna be that like one in a thousand
type of person. That's how important it is to me.
Lou Pelosi: All right, and Julie, last thoughts
around that?
Julie Schoenfeld: So a team is everything, and there's
an alchemy to a team,
and, you know, David talked about hiring
someone smarter than you, and someone
who's different than you.
You're really trying to put together
a puzzle and, especially if you're
running a startup, you're all about your constraints.
Sorry David, you're never about constraints at
Google, but in a startup--
David Jen: We have constraints!
Julie Schoenfeld: --you are about your constraints, and when I look at a team that's failing,
it's generally because, as I say, you have
the tuba player trying to play the
flute. What you really want to do is hire
people who can do the job that they do
naturally very well
and have them do that job, but then have
them integrate into the team.
What i have seen is when I see teams failing,
it's because they get political,
they aren't all pulling in the same
direction. They, you know, generally one person
especially in a small team, especially small innovation team
can destroy the productivity of the rest of the team. So
harmony on the team and the ability for the team to bring
each other along is better sometimes
than having one individual superstar,
although in the software world, we could
probably get a debate going, but
the best results I have seen is
when you get this team dynamic where
the team raises, you know, raises each
other up, and everybody performs
at the highest level.
Lou Pelosi: Super, well, thank you very much.
Fantastic to have you two superstars
on our session today. Thank you very much, I know your time is
incredibly valuable. I appreciated your
insights and bringing that to the
broader Tufts community. Would like to thank two other people.
Aime Macdonald, who
manages the behind the scenes and makes
sure everything goes great. Thank you
very much, Aime.
And Sue Purdy Pelosi, my wife, who's been
manning the Q and A's and helping
out with some of the operations, so
thanks very much to you two. Upcoming events, please
keep in mind, September 10th is a date that we'll have
the next event, and we'll be sending
out more information on that,
and on September 21st, there will be a
a session entitled E-Commerce
Startups: What It Takes, Pitfalls, and
Lessons Learned. And that's on September
21st, so
I think we just shared the Tufts Gordon Institute
Entrepreneurial Alumni Network link,
where some of those upcoming events
will be promoted and information
can be found.
Thanks very much, very much appreciated
your time today. I hope you enjoyed it,
and we'll look forward to hopefully
seeing you on some of the future
sessions.
Bye now.
