 Good afternoon, and we're delighted to have Dr. Serge Bell with us, who wears many hats. He's a Singaporean entrepreneur, investor, and an executive. He founded more than two dozen global IT companies and virtual funds, as well as several science and educational institutions. Some of the companies that Dr. Bell founded include Acronis, a global leader in cyber protection, and Parallels, a virtualization and automation software company. He's currently a founder and chairman of the Constructor Group, an international research institution that promotes science and education in cutting-edge technologies to solve human problems. He holds a bachelor's degree in physics, a master's degree in physics and electronic engineering, and PhD in computer science and has filed over 350 patents. So he's very well and very interesting speaker for us at OIST Innovation. We are excited to hear about his views and the key characteristics of the great entrepreneurs. Dr. Bell, the floor is yours. Thank you. Last time I presented this speech, I was actually in Google campus in Zurich, and this was sort of an interesting experience because for the first time Google fired some 10 or 15% of its employees. And so when I arrived to Google campus, there was a bunch of people with posters against firing employees. It was just a couple of weeks ago. This time I'm presenting it here. I'm told to present it shorter, so I'll try to be very, very brief. Also, I'm a little bit sick, so my energy level is about 25% of normal, so it will be more informative than motivating. So first it's about me. I was born in the Soviet Union and I went to some of the top schools in mathematics and physics for my high school, and then to, I believe, the top university in the Soviet Union for physics. But it was not very conscious actually decision to study physics or computer science. I was a little child growing up in a family of two physicists, and I wanted to actually study how human brain works. Mistakenly, because I was at that time 12 years old and 11, I started reading books about neurosurgeons. Obviously, neurosurgeons have no clue how brain works. I was just able to cut it, and then my parents convinced me that if I want to know how the brain works, I have to study physics and mathematics, and I ended up studying it. While I was studying, Soviet Union collapsed, and everything collapsed around us, and so I was accidentally involved in business and very quickly moved to Singapore in 1993 for not any particular design or reason, and then I stayed in Singapore, opened office in San Francisco in 1995, and chose to be Singaporean citizen, North American citizen. Initially, our office in Singapore was related to sourcing computer and electronic components from all over Asia. At that time in the 90s, there was a perception that perhaps electronic components could be made in Indonesia, Malaysia, Vietnam. Over time, that has disappeared, almost everything is now made in China, and maybe it will move back with modern geopolitical developments. But I also started developing software, and accidentally in Singapore in 1997 or 1996, Bill Gates was visiting, and we were developing some reasonably strange software which you would develop with your scientist. It was over-the-counter financial derivatives evaluation software, but we were the only software company which was interested in using latest Microsoft technologies, so we met Bill Gates, and we had no clue how to develop software, but Bill Gates praised our software primarily because it was based on latest Microsoft technologies. At that time, those latest Microsoft technologies didn't work. We didn't know about it, so we were trying to use them, and from that point onwards we decided that we are the best software engineers in the world, and we built our first company, Solomon Software South Asia, which eventually was sold to Microsoft for some tens of millions of dollars, not too much. Then we started a second company, Parallels, which I was CEO of for about 11 years, from 2000 to 2010, and it has been eventually sold for about $3.8 billion in different pieces, and it's a reasonably successful company. For example, our code still runs on every Mac computer. It's part of Mac OS kernel, and we get paid from every 10% of all the Macs and from all the Chromebooks for the desktop version, and our software also runs and manages around 50% of all websites in the world. So 50% of all websites in the world are using software from a totally unknown company called VEPROS, which is part of Parallels. Then I decided to retire, and I built an investment business. I was doing investments informally from about a year to a thousand, so for about 25 years, and I decided to formalize it, build a rune capital, and several other funds, which over time we have invested in and bought over 500 companies, and around 100 of them exited. A couple dozens are so-called unicorns, and we achieve reasonably good results. It's a good fund. Unfortunately, one of the spin-offs of Parallels, Acronis, wasn't doing too well in 2013, so Acronis is actually 20 years old. It was a spin-off from Parallels, so it was part of Parallels, as so a bunch of other companies here. Then I went and run Parallels and rebuilt it. When I came to run Parallels in 2013, it was doing extremely bad. Maybe it was valued around $100 million. Now it's valued at around $5 billion, and it's growing very rapidly, and it's doing quite well. I'm no longer a CEO, but I'm still a majority shareholder. That's my story. If you look at my career, almost all companies which I built were either computers and electronics early in the career, and then software, and it's almost always infrastructure software. If you look at them closely, they are very similar to each other. They're all actually infrastructure, platform, and set of applications for some vertical market. That was what Parallels did. That is what Accomatica did, and that is what Acronis are doing still today. Also, because I went to Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, many of the graduates ended up being faculty in the top universities in the world, and I kept close contacts with them. I have people who are minus five, plus five years from me in Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, in Kaltech, in Oxford, in Cambridge, in Harvard, in MIT, in Cornell, in almost everywhere. Through that, I kept very close contact with science and education. Over time, I helped a number of scientific institutions in Singapore. By now, I can say, unfortunately, some in Russia. I'm not a Russian citizen, and so it was weird for me, Singaporean, to help institutions in Russia, but Russia didn't look too bad in the past. With that, after I decided that I don't want to run Acronis and I've hired my replacement, I've decided to finally focus on something which I wanted to do for a long time, and this is something which I call Constructor Group. I'm not going to stop on these books. I recommend that you read them. How many of you read any of the books here? Which one did you read? That one, okay. Anybody else? Read any books? Okay, well, I recommend to read them. These are interesting books. They are mostly sort of meta-science books. So, the reasonable way to understand how the world is organized, this book is actually 50 years old, but is still actually extremely relevant now. This book is very new, and this is three books coming from the same group, which in high-end quantum physics typically perceived to be too philosophical, and this guy is actually an anthropologist, but as it happens quite often, even though he's an anthropologist and psychiatrist, his book is much relevant to artificial intelligence and cybernetics. So, what we are trying to do in Constructor is done because of very simple thing. The world has many, many different problems. As you grow up, you realize that you can actually solve some problems. It is not necessary to wait for some entrepreneur or for some government, or for some group of people you can help. And some problems, at least here, they're all very well-known. The priority changes, I think at the moment people are primarily worried about the war. Let's say maybe five years ago people were more worried about the environment, and people should always be worried about aging, which is one of the topics of this institution here, but they are not worried about aging because people are programmed not to worry about aging. If you would be worried about aging, you will be very depressed because all of us will end up being dead in a not distant future, and it will be a painful process to get to be dead. Apparently, the only way to solve problems is through science. If you look at the history of humanity, it is clear that this is the best way to solve problems. And what is great is that science is not very much reached the limits of what is possible. There is a lot of problems in science which are unsolved. You know, for the average person who reads the Internet, they may think that everything is known, but it's actually quite not known. That is actually Misha Lukin, who is my classmate and my friend, so I know Misha for 35 years. He's in Harvard building, in my opinion, the best quantum computer in the world at this point, and he actually told me that 10 years ago people thought that in physics everything is reasonably well understood and right now they think that it's not. And so science is applied through technology. That's another amazing thing which happened to us over the last 50 years. 50 years ago people were building technology and science in a slightly separate space, and I think this place reminds me a little bit, not too much, but a little bit of the books I've read about Bell Labs, which is called The Idea Factory. It's a great book. At least the building is designed in somewhat similar fashion. And it's quite amazing that what happens now, you can take deeply fundamental science and almost immediately create some product from it. And there are hundreds of billions of dollars generated as revenue from products which were 10 years ago not known because of science. It's especially happening in biotechnology. So a lot of research which is published in Nature very quickly end up being a commercial product. And with that we believe that we wanted to start something we call Constructor Group, which is based on the concept of Constructor, a very simple concept where you take a system and convert it from A to B, and you can repeat it many times. The concept was popularized by this group of people. So this guy invented Universal Tuning Machine, which is sort of a universal computational device. It is somewhat limited and because of that this guy actually suggested the concept of Universal Constructor, which is a Turing machine which can replicate itself. These two guys are undoubtedly great scientists and undoubtedly should be listed in the top 100 most important scientists of the history of humanity and they generate a lot of good science. These two guys are also related to this guy to that guy and this guy to that guy and probably you know all of them because you're a scientist, right? So you know all of them. And this guy is a metaphysicist and he tried to create a constructor theory which is trying to generalize the concept of Universal Constructor. We like the concept, we don't build the university around this concept, we just build the university around this idea and we believe that to build constructors and constructors could be a person, could be an object, could be a process, could be a program, could be a robot. It's just something which takes a system and converts it from A to B and can do it multiple times. But ultimately what we need to solve the world problems we need to build a lot of constructors. And constructors, to build constructors unfortunately need education. If you look at the education of the past, it is not necessarily done in an ideal way. It has been built from the bottom up. So first education for political, cultural and religious reasons then perhaps science was bolted on top. And this is a very good example where people can see that there is a conflict between science and education, because here you guys don't do a lot of education but you do a lot of science. And then if you go to a university there is a lot of education but then perhaps there is a lesser time which people can do science even though there's two related processes. And what happened recently is that scientists can actually make technologies which make a lot of money but that is not necessarily helping. And scientists most of the time still need to go and beg for money from donors, from administration of university, from different foundations also from governments. So this is rather disconnected. So scientists actually are in the center but they're still on the side. And so we try to hack it and build it from top down. Not going to stop on it too much but that's what the constructor is, three different entities. We have faith constructor knowledge which is a university. Eventually we end up targeting 15,000 students on campus and 150,000 students online. Unfortunately to be successful as a private institution we have to have scale and we have to have online. Online for us is a funnel. We are also building software and technology to run our university and our main commercial part is to sell this software and technology, to other research centers and universities. So initially 20% of the usage of our software is us. Eventually 0.2% of the usage of our software is us. And then we also have constructor capital which might be most relevant for some of you here because we invest in startups, 20 to 30 investments of 100,000 Swiss francs in a single investment per year and some kind of incubator program and around 10 to 15 early stage investments with average check around $5 million focused on deep tech or physics tech, life tech, autonomous tech, educational technology and software technology. So all of it assumes most often than not in all these five areas like science, education, physics, software, an autonomous application of software engineering, computer science, mathematics, physics and machine intelligence. And we also have very broad academic network. It just happens that all of the businesses we build are deeply technological and so all these people here, Kosti is Nobel Prize winner for Graphene, he's in Singapore, he's from the same university as I am. Nisha is in Harvard, he's quite probably one of the most well-known quantum technologists today. Marcus Gross is a chief scientist of Disney, he's one of the well-known artificial intelligence expert in the area of computer visions and generating sort of hybrid reality with similar laws of physics. Lita Nelson was actually running technology transfer office in MIT and Mark Hamlet was a provost of Carnegie Mellon. So I can go through all these people, all these people are actually involved in building our university. It's not very dissimilar to what you do here. So these people are part-time, so some of them are junk professors, some of them are just board members, but they are involved. So that's what we're trying to do and with that there is a little bit more information about constructor capital. You guys are based in Japan but very few of you are actually Japanese. And there is a very well-organized fund which is reasonably successful, which is called UTEC, it's University of Tokyo Capital. It is very similar to what we do. We are looking primarily to find companies which are spin-offs from university, not from our university, but from any university. I'm Singaporean, my partner is Swiss. The other partner, Swiss, Singaporean, American, but from Argentina. And so we're looking at companies all over the world. We believe right now you can find really good companies which are spin-offs from universities. And they have a very, very different way of operating from the companies which are actually real companies which are just built by entrepreneurs. There is many difference into how scientific companies run and how actually commercial companies run. And we believe we can help. We can help to go global. We can help to build the companies. And so that's the first part of the presentation. So that's the second part. So I wanted to talk about entrepreneurs. And so this is one entrepreneur which is a relatively well-known, Hernán Cortés. Typically he's not present as an entrepreneur. Who knows who is Hernán Cortés? He's the guy who actually conquests Mexico. You must know, you are from Brazil. But he didn't go to Brazil, luckily. But apparently this guy wasn't actually a military commander. He was actually very much an entrepreneur. He was an accountant, a very entrepreneurial accountant which at some point decided that the best way to make money and to become a governor of Cuba, what's he becoming a governor of at the end? I forgot, but it's the best way to conquest Aztec civilization. And he actually landed with 100 savers, 11 ships, 500 soldiers, 16 horses. And he basically was outnumbered 300 to 1. And then he ended up destroying one of the most ancient civilizations and killing a lot of people. It is quite natural entrepreneurs of the past were mostly killing people. This is some other entrepreneurs. Alexander's a great. That's an estimate from the internet that his wealth today would be about 32 trillion dollars. And then Julius Caesar, he actually was less successful and died a little bit later, but not much later after he became successful. And Chinggis Khan, probably the most successful entrepreneur of all time, you should think about it. That Chinggis Khan was born very poor in Mongolia, which was very undeveloped and was very divided and nevertheless he built the largest land empire of the history and his wealth today would be 120 trillion dollars. And then you have this entrepreneur, Henry Ford. It's not well known, but Henry Ford is also serial entrepreneur. He did multiple sins before he became successful. And Steve Jobs, if he would have been alive, he would have made 360 billion dollars. At the point when this presentation was first made, the idea of Apple stock is, you know, varying. And then Elon Musk, I mean, all of these are serial entrepreneurs. So it's important that if I want to talk about qualitative entrepreneurs, I'm a scientist, physics and computer science. And so all of it is eventually mathematics. So it has to be somehow repeatable. And all of the guys were able to be repeatedly successful. And so, you know, when I made this speech before, right, I would first show what is not a great entrepreneur. So you would think like great entrepreneur have to be very educated. And we know that it's not true. So a lot of the guys had no education. So this particular guy, he couldn't even write initially, Chinggis Khan. And, you know, this guy did not graduate from any university. And this guy actually dropped out of Stanford PGD program. So he was reasonably good. So I think the next one will drop out from postdoc. So prior to him, Google people dropped out of the master program in Stanford. So the bar of an education is going up. Then you might think that these would be people who are, you read in Harvard Business Review, entrepreneur is an ethical person. So he's a nice person. And that's actually also not true. I met most of entrepreneurs that are complete assholes. And some of them are total social parts. You might think that they might have a great network, right? So they are basically successful because they have, they come from a family of network. And, you know, many of the people here, they didn't have any network like this guy didn't and that guy didn't. And in fact, even that guy, he didn't really have a network. I mean, of course, Alexander's a great, actually had a great network. And I'm not sure about Elon Musk, I guess not, right? And you might think that these people are hardworking. And that's actually also not true. I know many entrepreneurs which are not hardworking. So they work 30 hours a week. And they're still very successful. I can see you like it. I believe. And then you might think that entrepreneurs are very clever. And actually I met some very dumb, but serious successful entrepreneurs. Like really stupid. Like really you think like how is it possible that this person is actually making money so many times and managing these huge companies and so on and so forth. And so when I started investing, I sort of coming up with a list of things which great entrepreneurs have and it ended up initially being five and then 15 qualities. And I'm going to talk about each of those qualities, why they're important. And some of these qualities you may have, some of the qualities you may try to emulate or train. So, you know, some of these qualities you may not have, but you might remember that having, let's say, three of these qualities might not be enough. Having eight of them might be a very good number. It's not necessarily that you have to have all of them at the same time. So the first thing is ambition. I don't know if you've watched this movie, it's on Netflix. And the movie is about pure ambition. The guy was just very ambitious and so he was able to climb 14,000 peaks in seven months. Prior to him, there was a group which climbed it in seven years and prior to that, there was a guy who climbed them in 30 years. And so he did it in seven months out of pure ambition. And he, of course, in the movie, it's a good movie, actually. It's a well-filled movie. It's kind of cool. They claim that the guy is totally normal guy, just like all of us. But then they show that his oxygen retention is about several times higher than a normal person. So really, I don't think any of us should try what he did, but he was quite successful out of ambition. And so this is the five key qualities. So the first quality is ambition. So ambition is a special quality. It is often people are shy of their ambitions. And many entrepreneurs are ambitious just because they're stupid. So you have to be reasonably stupid to be ambitious. Because it's not really pleasant to fail. And if you're ambitious, you fail all the time because you just take on things which you're not sure you can deliver. But often, if you take on things which you're not sure you can deliver, you have a situation where other people will fail and will not take on such things. And quite often when you have a small ambition, you're trying to build a small stop or a small market share or a small revenue, that is actually not going to work. Then initiative. Any of you study game theory here? So game theory says to us that initiative is actually a mathematical term. You can actually, in a game, have an initiative and initiative can help you win in a losing position. And it's especially true when you play game with people because people also make mistakes. So these two gentlemen, do you know who that is? It's Bobby Fisher, right? And actually, there is this sort of... Yeah, well, I'll tell it later, but do you know who that is? Magnus Carlsen. So both of them are very annoying players because quite often when they start losing, they take initiative and they behave very weird and they make people make mistakes. And so they actually win in the situations or get a drawing situation where they should lose. And so initiative is something which you take. You don't wait, you don't prepare. You just take initiative. And it's quite uncomfortable because, again, it's just like with ambition when you take initiative, it might be that people say, are you stupid? And typically they do. Never give up. Do you know who this guy is? Right, it's the founder of Starbucks. And so he was rejected 217 times with his very ambitious idea to build Starbucks. And the idea was quite a bit crazy because he was planning to sell coffee at about 20 times more expensively than other people did, but in a special way. And he was successful, right? But he was rejected 217 times. And in a way, this is sort of a key quality for the guy because, you know, most of us would not actually be pursuing our dream after being rejected 217 times. It's too many times. And you have to understand, it's not rejected by stupid people. You guys are scientists. So you might think, yeah, I'm a scientist. These guys who are rejecting me, they don't understand me. But he was doing coffee selling. So everybody understood him. And most of them who understood him were very successful business people. And they would very, very convincingly explain to him that he's an idiot and he nevertheless built Starbucks. Then making decisions. So making decisions is again another feature. I have to tell you, these things are all very, very related to being not too clever. And it's a mathematical term. You guys are laughing, but if you read books about machine intelligence, you will realize that machine intelligence have to forget a lot of details over time to learn, right? And so if it doesn't forget, it doesn't learn quite far enough. It doesn't go too deep in the sort of branches of the tree. And so making decisions in when you start a business, you have to make a lot of decisions where you don't have enough information. So you just have to make decisions based on intuition. Or quite often you just have to choose between five decisions. All of them look bad to you. And just one of them looks less bad. And you know, it's very well proven in football. So more than football teams win typically by making a lot of passes. And so every pass is a decision. And so this particular team, Manchester City, uses our software by the way from Constructor, but besides that, they make a lot of passes. And the pass is a decision. So instead of holding the goal and thinking, what should I do? Should I run? You pass to somebody and he passed to somebody. And the point of making decisions very quickly in an entrepreneurial situation is about being able to change decisions. You make the wrong decision, you make another decision, you make another decision, another decision. This is very similar to what you do in combat situation. If you are in a combat situation and you see people shooting at you, you have to tell your people run, stop, lie down, dig down, shoot back, run back. And you can change it, but you cannot wait. Otherwise everybody is dead. And in some ways being not very clever helps because that way you don't think and you make a decision. Most people hesitate. And the final thing which is most important is detail orientation. This is very difficult, but when you build a business with $1,000 revenue and you want to build it to a business with $1 billion revenue. And nowadays that's a game. So when we started investing 20 years ago we would go to people and say we only invest in companies which want to build a business with $100 million in revenue. But that's no longer cool. So the inflation at the top of the chain went up and so building a unicorn is no longer cool. You have to build this desert corn with 10 horns and then you have to have $1 billion in revenue. And to have $1 billion in revenue will grow your business 1 million times. 1 million times. And so every small detail is important. And in general it is so amazing that in physics we know that distance is an illusion. There is no actually distance in quantum mechanics. It's just a time which is required for light to reach from A to B. And for many things like quantum entanglement it doesn't matter. But in real world we believe that some details are small and some details are not important. And some details are big so they are very important. Actually every detail is very important. So a lot of entrepreneurs they are increasingly detail oriented. Which makes them very annoying. So for example Steve Jobs was extremely annoying person. And actually he wasn't an asshole in that way. People think that he would be rude to people but he wasn't rude in the way you would think. He would just be extremely detail oriented. And that is just annoying when somebody is so detail oriented that this slide and find bunch of things which are on with the slide in a second. And he will tell it and for many people that would be annoying. Then there is the next five qualities which I added later. This is specifically a picture of empathy. So this guy is Batman. This guy is Joker. And both of them are very empathic people. So the empathy is not about being nice to people. It's about being able to feel people. So if you feel people you can manipulate people. And you know when I say it typically people are split and they would say like yeah I don't want to manipulate anybody. Unfortunately if you want to build a business you need to manipulate people. You need to manipulate your team. You need to manipulate your board. You need to manipulate your investors. You need to manipulate your partners. Vendors. Customers. And so you need to feel them. And so you have to try to understand what people feel when you talk and you can drive them to a bad outcome for them or to a good outcome for them but regardless. And so there's five more qualities. Responsive. It's very important to be responsive. Again in science it's not important. So Misha Lukin is my friend for such five years and only since six months he has a WhatsApp. Before that he never had a WhatsApp. Volvin Ketterli another Nobel Prize winner he still doesn't have a WhatsApp. Right so he still and if you send an email to Eugene Diemler he might reply in one minute or might reply in one week. So in science being responsive is not very important because science is about ultimate truth and so it doesn't matter if it takes longer or shorter to discover ultimate truth. In business it's about relative truth and so it is not so clear what's important what's not and so being very responsive helps and so it's also helps from the standpoint of handling emergencies because in emergency you don't know what happened and so just being responsive decreases the failure rate dramatically and if you're building a business it's always an emergency. Then you have to stay alert and so this is Julius Caesar apparently he wasn't very alert and this is completely true he wasn't very alert and they killed him right because for some reason he decided that they won't kill him and they did kill him and so you have to stay alert at all times as an entrepreneur. Alert is also another feature which potentially comes of being not too clever because if you're too clever in many circumstances you can relax because you think that you know exactly what's gonna happen and so you don't need to worry if you are not knowing it you are always on the alert state and so whatever happens you react to it you talk to people and you understand whom you're talking to and why you're talking to them and what's the context of the talk and that's another feature of great entrepreneur Entrepreneurs might not be too clever but they are very alert and they're very responsive so I always give this example of Michael Dell Michael invested in one of the companies which I suggested him to invest we invested together and so he invested $400,000, got $25 million back Michael Dell has $50 billion so $25 million for him is nothing but he told me he will always answer my emails as a thanks and he answers my emails and if I send an email to my executives in for example Acronis which on the average make anywhere from half a million to a million dollars a year in salary and they work for a company which is majority owned by me and my partners it might take 10 minutes or it might take 10 hours or it might even take several days for them to respond if there is a complicated question if I send an email right now to Michael Dell and he's not sleeping he might respond in 20 seconds so he's very very responsive extremely responsive and that's his feature there's a lot of other features which are not perfect for example he didn't graduate from the university and then activity in other scene very important activity is not the same as hard work so this is my typical activity 8 flights per month 168 calls 188 scheduled meetings and 9,000 emails and so a lot of people think about me and tell me that I'm very smart and I have high IQ this is not true I don't have a high IQ and I'm not smart but I'm extremely active and activity is not the same as hard work in my case I'm also working hard but I have entrepreneurs who work 30 hours a week and then they will dive and they will paraglide and they will do yoga and they will run marathon but within the 30 hours I'm extremely active and so it's not really about the hours it's about what you do with the hours and so how many activities you insert and unfortunately and that's really really annoying but I have to accept that I will tend to upgrade this quality up the stack because there is not really any replacement for activity and one of the main problems of scientific startups is actually that activity is typically very low typically scientists are not very active typically in science you can publish I don't know how many articles per year 5, 10 you know in some unique fields you publish 50 not so many right and actually you don't need to publish so many my dear friend Arthur he doesn't publish a lot of articles but whenever he publishes an article Arthur Recker whenever he publishes one article it's published sometimes on the front of Nature magazine and in fact there are some Nobel Prize winners which publish I don't know 10 articles in their career so you don't have to be very active you have to be right in business there is no replacement and so this is very annoying feature it's very easy to simulate it's annoying then empathy I already talked about empathy and then passion passion is very important this guys are very passionate guys this is the founder of Salesforce this is of course Steve Ballmer typically there was a video I'm not going to show a video today but you can go and find the video of Steve Ballmer who is jumping on the scene being a CEO of $300 billion Microsoft which had $50 billion in revenue shouting beating himself on the head that's what I see in myself throwing chairs at people you know one of the actually great people I met in my career is Paul Moritz he's the chairman of the board for Acronis which is a $70 billion market cap business he was one of the three people who built Microsoft two times he was offered a position to be CEO of Microsoft and at some point I was asked who will win a discussion Paul Moritz or Steve Ballmer and Paul Moritz is so clever and then the person people all of course Steve Ballmer because even in case Paul will be winning an instruction Paul will throw a chair Steve will throw a chair at him and the discussion will be over and that's passion passion sells passion is very difficult in science because you can't sell fault theory right so if you have a faulty theory you can sell it you can be as passionate as you can but if it doesn't it's not correct it's not going to work in business you can sell and you can only sell with science and this guy was also very passionate guy this is my last and this is sort of tactical excellence and Roman Empire was in some ways built on tactical excellence of Roman military which if you compare to other militaries at that time was extremely well organized and so being tactically excellent is quite often perceived to be not important but in fact it's absolutely mandatory so it is not enough it is not sufficient but it's mandatory to be tactically excellent and so the sharks I think you have a lot of sharks here there are sharks around Okinawa any accidents with shark attacks there must be they don't talk about it typically because then tourists don't come but then this is another example actually again it's a wrong book I keep forgetting to replace it the last place on earth it's a race to the south pole it's a race to the south pole which was sort of competition between very large very well funded team of Britain and very small not very well funded team of Norwegians and Norwegians actually prepared extremely well the point of this is that in a small setup you need to and you can build a culture of the fact that everybody is responsible for everything so everybody is responsible for how the door works and how the toilet works and how the trash is thrown out and whether internet is good or not and whether the logo is correct whether there is a spelling error on the website or whether there's somebody who joined just now can find a kindergarten for his child or can find a walker for his dog or a vet for his lizard and so this is sort of universal care state doesn't spread too big so you can still be very much caring about everything in a setup of 5 people, 50 people 500 people it becomes less possible but the most important for any startup is to get to this 500 people then face face is very important so what happens is that quite last 25 years entrepreneurship and startup building became a fashion so very often when you come to scientific institution like this people will build startups not because actually they want to make money because they are actually chosen academic careers so they chosen to be enjoying what they do and satisfying their curiosity so money is secondary and not because it's actually something which institution pushes them but it's actually a fashion and so because of this fashion you get a lot of people who go and try to build startups and they think it is enjoyable activity believe me building a real multi-billion dollar company is always a lot of stress it's extremely stressful to build a company and the main stress comes from the fact that people will try to convince you and your employees that what you do is stupid and that your software doesn't work and the market is very niche and it's only temporary and nobody will buy it and it doesn't matter whether your idea is amazing in fact you would think that it would matter that you build it multiple times so I built five multi-billion dollar companies and they would think that when I start a new one which is constructor I will get like a line of people coming to me say yeah please take our money we support you know every time you start a new business if it's really good they people say no you're stupid finally you went crazy finally now this is not going to work and you know you don't know what you're doing you are getting old you are just becoming romantic and you are doing charity work and blah blah blah right and so it's very stressful because you're not talking about people from the outside you're talking about your friends you're talking about your partners, you're talking about your investors you're talking about your family we believe in knowledge for example if you don't have faith in what you do you cannot have passion and faith is a blind sin for example my father has doctorate in physics very briefly he worked for Princeton but before that he worked for San Pedro State University and I always have in his 78 next week and I always have discussions with him about what is sort of better Christianity or quantum mechanics and so he always tells me no religion is stupid quantum mechanics is amazing it's final truth but you have to understand it is a matter of face we believe quantum mechanics is good and it's good for now there is a lot of limitations to quantum mechanics we now know a lot of limitations to quantum mechanics and it's probably there will be superseding theory which will make quantum mechanics look as strange as classical mechanics but we generally believe in knowledge we believe knowledge is good we believe knowledge can be created and so having faith in something is important and then self-awareness three different people so this guy Donald Trump so he is actually quite self-aware the point is that people don't understand that he is self-aware of being Donald Trump so he is not self-aware of being a nice person and so he behaves consistently to his self-awareness and he is actually quite empathic I actually accidentally bought a small hotel in Italy from a guy who went to the same college with Donald Trump and so he was in a class of six boys with Donald Trump for about three years and not that he knows Donald Trump very well he just was in the class and it was a long time ago and he told me Donald Trump was the same when he was in that class he was like 16, 17, 18 so he had always his rear view mirrors turned this way looking at himself even then in college but he is self-aware then as Julius Caesar he was reasonably self-aware up until last point and this is sort of one of my favorite guys Lee Kuan Yew who created Singapore he was quite amazing guy he was actually very self-aware probably out of people I know personally, I met personally self-aware person I've ever met and there's a lot of speeches of him on YouTube and you know he's quite interesting guy being self-aware is very important because it's important that while you have faith or you may believe in Christian religion or Jewish religion or whatever other religion you may believe in quantum mechanics who believes in quantum mechanics you see I mean I sort of believe in quantum mechanics with disclaimer it's important to remember that is just faith and it's important to remember what you know what you don't know and actually what I unfortunately found is many people who are great entrepreneurs fail when they lose self-awareness which is when they try to go after something which they really cannot do and then finally you should remember that there is never limit to learning and that is another thing is that yes you can do success over and over again but the world is changing very very rapidly and so every time you do a success circumstances has changed and so you have to learn new things and you know learning is nothing much but a habit it's very easy for scientists to learn it's also very easy for lawyers to read and for doctors and so just reading and learning is always good and you know if I sort of talk to entrepreneurs right now it's relatively easy for me to grade them on these criteria and it's also you would imagine not so difficult to emulate it but I can see you know a lot of times when people will try to for example avoid being active or when people believe that instead of being instead of being responsive they can be thoughtful like for example somehow manage there is all these books on Amazon efficiently like respond to certain messages and certain time of the week or certain time of the day instead of responding to them immediately and you have also people that think that ambition they have to limit the ambition that's a typical speech from startup it's just a typical speech which is not always so bad but it's just a bad sign startup comes and say yeah you know you have to take a step to get the revenue right so that's lack of ambition because apparently it is well known that if you only have 1% of the market you don't survive for a very long time so in order for you to survive you need to target at least 15% of the market and better you target 50% of the market and you know you a lot of other things right so was that this is a second part of my presentation you should have a strategy. Strategy is a very simple thing. By the way, it's a great movie. Have you seen this movie? Any of you? It's about how Koreans kick ass to Japanese. I'm sorry if this is incorrect. To say it in this audience, this is a famous Korean historical character, Lee Incheon or something like that, who basically attacked 20 times or 30 times more ships and were able to succeed through application of strategy. It's a Korean movie. It was watched very widely in Korea and Japan. It's on Netflix. I recommend that you watch it. It's quite a cool movie. But the bottom line, strategy is extremely important. When you build a startup, especially if you are here, that means it's based on knowledge. And knowledge has no borders. Knowledge is much more powerful than anything in the world. It's much more powerful than nuclear bomb or turbine nuclear bomb or whatever, right? Because you can build nuclear bomb only with knowledge. And so with knowledge, it's not about having more people or having more money or having more time or having more land. It's about having the right strategy. And so the first thing is to know your opportunity very well. And this is the first typical mistake. People don't research what they try to do. What is a really total addressable market? Who are the customers? Who are the users? Who are the partners? Who are the competitors? Who are the vendors? How it developed in the last 10 years? How it will develop in the future 10 years? And specifically, how much they would pay to you in your prices and your business model and so on and so forth. If you search the opportunity, you can come up with a strategy, which is, again, very simple three things. One is what is unique about what you do, how nobody else can actually replicate it, how it applies your capabilities. So, you know, world is effectively a game. You know, some people in the past said the world is an act. And in my opinion, it's more of sort of a game. And it's a game of people competing with each other. And people are generally rather equal species. You know, it was in the past quite common to perceive that women and men are different. That's not actually accurate. And, you know, that some people of different races are different. People are very similar. They have two legs, two hands, two eyes, two ears. They have a brain of approximately the same size with approximately the same number of neurons. And so, you compete with similar people like you. And if you compete with similar people, unless you can leverage your unique capabilities, which are either because of your culture, or because of your background, or because of your education, or because of your upbringing, or because of whatever, maybe you run very fast, then you will find somebody else competing with you who will leverage his unique capabilities, which may be different from yours, but he might be able to win. So unique capabilities fit to your unique differentiation fitting the opportunity. And then focus. Okay, focus is widely misunderstood thing. So in the books, when I started my first business, say in 1992, till 1997, I went through a completely unconscious business experience. I wasn't thinking at all what I was doing. I was just sort of running forward and not thinking. And maybe from 97 to 2007, I started thinking more. I'm from 2007 to 2017. I mean, by the way, it's not very good to be able to think that means that you're just getting older. So instead of figuring out things on new, you just have your brain already figured everything out. So it probably makes your brain less creative. But in 97 and 2007, people thought about you have to focus on one thing. And that's not how it is in startup. You cannot focus on one thing. You can focus on less things. So you can focus on 1,000 things instead of 100,000 things. And in a way, if you look at every business, there's a lot of things you need to worry about. There is legal, there is finance, there is fundraising, there is board members, there is executives, there is employees, there is a technology, there is patterns, there is software, there is hardware, there is sales price, there is packaging, there is different products, there's different compare. I mean, I can go on, right? And it doesn't mean that you focus on say, for example, let's make an excellent product. You can pick from each of them. It's just you have to pick limited number of things so you can actually do it. And so focus is about figuring out how to not focus on unnecessary things. But these unnecessary things are not necessarily grouped in very continuous manner in sort of a topology of the startup. And then finally, execution. Nothing replaces execution. You have to remember that you have to have execution abilities to execute your strategy. And that your execution ability have to fit your opportunity. Sounds very simple. Most of the time people don't think about it and they make a mistake. And most of the time there is another thing which they forget that business is business. It's not about changing the world, it's about making money. You can't change the world unless you make money. Unfortunately in this world, if you don't have money, you can't even build this institution. And this institution, first of all, talks about one thing. It talks about that somebody was willing to spend money on building this institution. And so business is always about making money. And so it's always about making sure that you can do this since. And sometimes you want to change the world, but you just can't. And so there is a couple more slides here. So one slide is what I learned with age. And so first of all, I've learned that you have to carefully study your capabilities. You have to know your capabilities very, very well. And you have to find some unique capabilities. They may come from your unique connections from your family, from your education, from some book you read, from some place you visited, from some idea, but you have to find something which is reasonably defensible. And you have to also understand what you can and cannot do. So, you know, there is always saying, what's the best way to win against Bobby Fischer, right? Or to win against Magnus Carlson. So what's the best way? What do you think we spoke today? What's the best way to win against, huh? No, actually, don't play chess with him. And so if you play some other game, let's say football with Bobby Fischer, you probably win. Actually, modern chess requires a lot of physical activities so Magnus Carlson is actually very good at sports. So maybe with him you need to, I don't know, solve quantum mechanics problems or something like this. Next thing which I've learned is that it's very difficult to force your team and yourself to research the opportunity in detail. So people never research their opportunities in detail. It is extremely annoying. People always want to pursue their idea and they always are afraid to learn that their idea is not really applicable. And so do spend a lot of time researching the opportunity. This is extremely important. It is totally possible today. When I started 30 years ago, there was no internet. Now you can go to chat GPT and ask a couple of questions and it will tell you everything you need to know as of September 2021. Unfortunately, but soon probably later. Then planning, very important to do planning. So imagine you're a billion dollar business in 10 years and try to roll back and figure out what you needed to have and to be a billion dollar business in revenue in 10 years or a hundred million dollar business in revenue in 10 years if you really don't have enough ambition to build a billion dollar business in 10 years. And so planning is never useful. You're never gonna follow those plans but the planning activity, especially if you do it with your team, creates alignment and allows you to be prepared for something which will come in during the campaign of building your business and react quicker. Next thing is to understand the profiles of your employees, vendors, of your partners, of your board members, of your executives, of your investors. Today it is extremely easy to understand whom you're meeting. There are internet tools which for very small amount of subscription money can give you ability to learn a lot about the person you're meeting. If you learn a lot about the person you're meeting and it's always about people. Sometimes it's about companies but more often it's about people. You can, your brain is actually not very much designed for quantum mechanics but it's very much designed for social behavior. And so if you learn something about other people it will be much easier for you to be alert in the meeting and to be persuasive. And what I found, even today, I am not always prepared for my meeting. So for example, today I'm a little bit sick and so I did not prepare for my meetings today very well so I didn't know everybody here when I first meet them. But it's totally possible to prepare. Yes, quite often it could be even as deep as invasion of privacy. Remember that the most important thing is to win and not to break any laws or if you break them a little bit not to be caught but it's important to win. And there is no way to win unless you know whom you're dealing with and you can know. And finally, it's very difficult to rely on your intuition because intuition is objective sin, right? So people are now studying neuroscience, including here and the conscious part of your brain is very small and we quite often try to rely on our conscious part of our brain to make decisions. Subconscious part of your brain collects a lot of information about this, for example, room. I see a lot of stuff in this room right now but I'm not consciously seeing it and that feeds my intuition. So later when I do something, I can rely on my intuition. So listening to intuition and being able to understand what exactly your intuition tells you can make you schizophrenic or paranoid. And that's why a lot of successful people are schizophrenic or paranoid because they listen to themselves too much and so they have some illusions and visions but can also teach you how to use your brain because brain is your main instrument. You know, it's not your hands and it's not your legs and it's not your ass or your, I don't know, six pack but it's your brain and brain primarily consists of subconscious and so trying to figure out how to understand what your brain telling you is extremely useful. Okay, so as I said, I wanted to talk about this is last slide before last slide is to prepare for happiness through progress. So again, if you build startup, in my opinion, there is only one reason to build startup is to be successful. There is no point to build startup and fail and to be successful, it's always competition with other people. And in competition, you have to understand that it will never be very easy and you have to prepare first to change, constant change. It's very difficult to always change. You start something and then you find something and you need to pivot to this direction, this direction, this direction, this direction, this direction. The main advantage of startup in comparison to a large company like say Sony or Fujitsu and NAC is that pivoting is very easy but generally people don't like change. People don't like change even in case they want to move from Okinawa to say Tokyo or from Tokyo to Okinawa, it's a change. Actually, if they try to create a table of what actually will change in their life it would not be that much but it's just the concept of change is very difficult. And so you have to be ready to continuous change. You make a plan, you announce a plan to everybody and then next day something else come up. Well, if you are in an entrepreneurial business you have to move left or right and this is unpleasant but you have to do it. Next thing, there's never gonna be focus. It's always going to be annoying. When I was young, I couldn't actually remember which writer was it. I read a non-existential book about the hell for a business person. So description of hell for a business person was a person who sits on a table and he has 25 phones which are constantly ringing and so he have to answer all the phones and there is 25 assistants which constantly come in to him and ask him to make decisions, right? So there is many, many things. He'd never have time to make the right decision. It's very, very annoying. And you know, typically business consultants because the business consult large business they come in and say, yeah, let's focus. Fortunately, you cannot focus. It will not be possible to focus and it's very, very difficult psychologically. Next thing, it's never enough resources. Okay, if it's enough resources, something is wrong. And you know, having too many resources for a stopper is a bad thing. So it's never enough resources. Having not enough resources is completely normal. You know, again, remember the case of Hernán Cortés with his troops conquering Mexico. He never had enough resources. So you have to get accepted to the fact that it will be not enough time, not enough money, not enough equipment, not enough people, not enough time to make a decision. Again, very, very stressful. Then negativity, lots of negativity. You know, when you read, people tend to be forgetting negative things. It's not pleasant to remember them and the way our brain are programmed by nature is that when you go through experience of building a billion dollar revenue company, at the end of the journey, we kind of feel accomplished and we remember nice things. But actually, in the first several years, there is constant negativity. There is employees, family, investors, board members, customers, partners, which are all unhappy. They are unhappy because there is lack of resources. They are unhappy because there is too many things they need to do. They are unhappy because you constantly make them change. They are unhappy because your product doesn't work or your numbers don't work. But you have to be ready for this negativity. So happiness only comes through progress. And finally, one other thing which is very annoying is that when you study, you need to repeat sense. So you need to repeat sense multiple times. And that's when you deal with the precise sciences. It's slightly better with precise scientists because with precise sciences like physics or mathematics or computer science, you can actually go and read the book and the truth is objective. In building a business, there is no objective truth. And actually people tend to have illusion of communication. So people tend to think, I told him so he should know. And so the only thing you can do in a business, you have to learn the special trick to repeat sense multiple times. You know, it was a special experience for me with fundraising. So when I started doing fundraising, I built a pitch. And so I was building parallels. I was born in Russia, Singaporean person, raising money in Silicon Valley in 2001 and was 9-11. And so naturally people were not very positive. And so I met whatever, 100 VCs which told me no. And it was a special experience because I have to pitch them the same pitch multiple times. And typically you don't do it even in marketing. You have to present the same 25 pages 100 times, kind of like an actor. And you have to make the same jokes and you have to kind of play. And that was the first part of the experience. The second part of the experience was coming when I was, you know, getting investment from Intel Capital and from Cisco into parallels. And the difference is that in that case, you need to pitch the same thing 25 times, mostly to the same people. And so you have like, you know, seven people from Intel or 10 people from Cisco and nine of them out of 10 are the same people which heard you like five times. And one is new person. And so you come in and say, yeah, you know about us. And they say, no, he needs to know about you. And so you have to do the same pitch with the same jokes, with the same comments, you know, in other time. And the third part of this experience came to me with a repetition is when I came to run Acronis and I rebuilt the strategy. And it's my company, it's my employees, it's my executives. And technically they report to me and they're supposed to listen to me and make notes. Right? But Acronis Global Company, we have people from all over the world and probably in Japan they would have made notes and would actually remember it and I may be needing to repeat it only three times. But with my own employees, I had to repeat it like 300 times before people would sort of understand what I'm saying. And, you know, it's because it was reasonably complex. And initially I thought maybe I'm explaining it incorrectly because, you know, I explained it 30 times and people still come to me and say, yeah, you know, it's not very clear what we're doing or why we're doing it. And I said, yeah, but I told you, right? And so the point here is that you have to just repeat a lot of times, very annoying, but you have to be ready to repeat since a lot of times. And so with that, it's sort of one thing which is the last slide, you know, the last slide here is what to, ah, yeah, they actually did not include the last slide here. Wow, sorry guys. But there was one more slide here. But this is just about us. We are looking for, for students, employees. We are selling our software. We're looking for startups and we are investing money. But I wanted to say that once in which also startups remember that the main part of your body is your brain. Right, so that's the main part of your body. And so it's very important that you develop your brain. And that you read books and you watch movies and you get to a habit of reading books, articles and on different topics, very cursory and watch movies very cursory and you learn. But apparently your brain is part of your body and the rest of your body needs to function. And you know, there is no life and work balance when you build a technology startup. So it's really mostly just work but you have to think about your body as a part of your work. So it's important that you make sure that your body is ready to do a startup and you make it, you embed it in your daily routine to make sure that you are actually healthy. It is very similar in chess. So at the time, 100 years ago, when people play chess, it was not so intensive activity. Today, chess players can lose up to 10,000 calories in a single day. So they can lose several kilos in a single day because the brain actually consumes, could consume up to 70% of your energy. And so you have to be extremely fit. And so in order to play chess, all the top chess players, you can look it up. They all become very fit. So they do a lot of exercises just to play chess, right? So it used to be that the jokes that in order to win against Magnus Carlsen, you just need to have Mike Tyson playing with him and he just have to hit him real hard and may work with Mike Tyson but most of us here, I don't know but I would imagine we are less fit than Magnus Carlsen. So it's not so different. If you build a startup, it is necessary to make sure that you are actually healthy because the main thing you invest is a healthy hours of your brain and for healthy hours of your brain, you need your body to function. And that's it. Unfortunately, it's too long. So you can ask me questions if you, I still have some minutes. That was supposed to be Q&A. Yes, yes. I know we went a little over. So if you, some of you need to leave, I did want to leave, we did want to leave some time for questions, for those of you who are interested in staying. So those that are sitting in front of microphones, please use your microphones. Those who are not, we can pass around a microphone to you. So just raise your hand if you have a question. Yes. Thanks for the nice talk. So I'm interested in your vision on future of quantum computers. So I know that you invested in IonQ, which is basically Ion's based quantum computers, but Michel Lucan is working in Redbrick Atoms. So I'm wondering what's your vision on future of quantum computers? Oh, yeah. Where is Michel Lucan? I'm looking for him here. Just maybe better his lab. So I think quantum computers is a fascinating field. And if you are a good investor or good entrepreneur, it is a good field where you can still make money if you stay conservative. I think generally, and unfortunately, this field is populated with hype. And so because it's populated with hype, people think about this as a sort of a, the global say, market is about, say $1,000 trillion total market cap, right? And the global economy is about $100 trillion. I mean, about means plus minus 30% depends on how you count it. And so they think that quantum computing will generate 10 trillion market cap and 1 trillion in revenue. And that's not so clear, but you don't have to get there to make money. And so before that, you can make quantum computers as a scientific instrument, sort of like new generation microscope, which allows you to look into quantum nature. And that is a good market. And definitely in the next 10 years, we will see a lot of science which is made with and next to building quantum computers. The market for scientific equipment is very large. Market for toys is very large. It's completely strange, but global market for toys is about $100 billion. That's a market for toys, right? So people buy toys. I mean, this is completely stupid thing. Children should not play any games, in my opinion. They should only read books and watch documentaries. From time to time, they can watch some really clever science, really clever fiction movies, but not too often because it's useless, right? I mean, why would people play toys? But people play toys, right? And so quantum computers are toys for those people who want to play science. And that's a large market. And so for this market, it's totally viable. This is one thing. And so I invested it. I already made money on IMQ, around 10X on a relatively small check on investment, which I invested very early, and we'll make money on Quora because we invest in a reasonable way and we have a reasonable expectation. Now, if quantum computers really work the way we believe quantum mechanics works, that would be quite interesting. And most likely we will be able to use it for a lot of different things. You have to be very clear that it is quite possible that it will not work, right? So it may be that there are a limitation of quantum mechanics. We observe a limitation of quantum mechanics. We live in a classical world and there is a quantum mechanical world and the quantum computer is very large quantum system. Effectively, this particular device here, today with many thousands of physical qubits fully controlled, perhaps Michel hasn't published it yet, is the largest controlled quantum system. So there is no larger quantum system we know. All the other quantum systems we know, they tend to fall down to classical behavior when they become large. And so, however, if this is true, then we will uncover new theory of nature, which is amazing scientific result. And so we can make money and we can uncover new theory of nature if we can actually build very large quantum computer, which is, of course, since many people here believe in quantum mechanics, I also reasonably believe we don't have any reason not to believe in quantum mechanics at the moment. And then in that case, most likely we'll be able to use it for a lot of different useful scenarios. But yeah, that's some years from now. It's not relevant to the current scientific or investment decision because even without it being sort of replacing classical computers or significantly amending classical computers, it's still a good market. So for example, market for scientific equipment is, I think, well over $10 billion a year. Other question? Nobody wants to ask question. Guys, you are not Japanese. This one thing I give speeches in Japan for about 20 years. And one thing you can see is the difference is that in Japan, people don't ask a lot of questions. And no, no, Sam, you should ask a question. Ask me a question. So, I mean, how long does it take for you to assess non-different noir to get those? No, it's not very easy to say because it's one thing about conducting any experiments on humans is that humans are very difficult to conduct experiments on. And so you have to absorb natural behavior and so it depends. And you still make a lot of mistakes when you assess people. But you rely on those assessments most of the time? Sometimes, we try to rely on those assessments. Is there anything that you suggest that helps us to get there faster? Do we come better understanding the people that you mentioned? Yeah, I don't know. I mean, I suggest to watch some sort of large number of movies about leaders, but very cursory, read books about different subjects, including some leaders which built some companies, countries, did military campaigns, political campaigns, built scientific sense. And maybe from there, you will figure out the sort of behavioral patterns which will help you. But I mean, I don't think, unfortunately, there is a way to sort of programmatically become better entrepreneur at this point. Thank you. Perhaps you can ask Chad GPT for advice every time you make a decision. I do, I do. Ha, ha, ha, ha, ha. Okay, thank you. Thank you for staying over. We're now over 15 minutes. Please feel free to exchange your business cards after this seminar with Dr. Bell. And just one very quick kind of promotion. This seminar has been sponsored by OIST Innovation. So we are a division of OIST that supports the communities, the universities, aspirations to bring their research and technologies into the world by supporting either your collaborations with companies or even promoting and helping you to establish your startup. So if you have any questions, contact us at innovation at oist.jp, very easy to remember, or better yet, come visit us in Lab 3, Level A, anytime. Thank you for participating.