 Good evening, everybody. I'm always excited when I see this many entrepreneurs. I have a passion for entrepreneurship and a passion for technology. And it's needed today more than at any other time. So I'm going to talk about reinventing societal infrastructure. But let me start by logistics. My Twitter handle at vCoastla, if you tweet questions added and it's on the screen, we'll try and answer them at the end of my talk. Here's the fundamental problem in why societal infrastructure needs reinventing. There's 700 million people or so, about 10% of the planet, that has a rich lifestyle. This is energy rich, building rich, education rich, medical care rich, rich in all sorts of ways. 7 billion people on the planet want it. And the only possible way is to have entrepreneurs do it. So that's why I'm here and I'm appealing to all of you to work on these hard problems. Let me talk about reinvention and what it means. It's about being unreasonable about proposed solutions and then making them happen. It's being unafraid of high probability of failure. I always say, there's people who try and fail and those who fail to try. It takes real almost a foolishness and a naivete and an optimism along with a knowledgeable and questioning attitude to really take on these big tasks and I hope the best of you can do that. My favorite quote is, George Bernard Shaw. And this is why we depend on unreasonable people to do this for us because they're the ones who will change the world. People like Elon Musk who says the world should be electric. Our space should be accessible differently. Or people like Larry Page. Let me start by saying the future generally is not knowable. But it is inventable. And those of you who are true entrepreneurs know that as you go through an entrepreneurial journey, you fail, you zig, you zag, you discover the right questions and then hopefully the right answers. It is the one fundamental reason large companies, large institutions will never do radical reinvention. I'll come back to it. It's the entrepreneurs who say why not do something instead of saying why it can't be done. I always like to say skeptics never did them possible. And for any hard task, any hard invention or any hard change, one can always come up with reasons why it can't be done. To me, when I run into an expert, I say you're an expert in a previous version of the world. We want to invent a new future we want. And that's my task for all of you. Since we are in Helsinki and there's so many thousands and thousands of entrepreneurs here, and I get really excited speaking to such an audience, I want to say one thing. Silicon Valley is not a place. It's a culture. It's the mindset, a state of thinking that creates disruptive innovation. And it can happen in any place as long as this culture exists. What Silicon Valley does really well is experiment and try lots and lots of different things. And those of you who are entrepreneurs know it's very hard to be an entrepreneur. It's glorified a lot, but the actual task is really, really painful sometimes. The journey is never smooth. In 1986, I did a presentation that's still on my website. I called it the entrepreneurial roller coaster where the highs are high, but nobody talks about the fact where the lows are really low. But let me say one thing. When we go towards inventing a new future, most institutions, and I have real beef with any institutional journey, most institutions assume improbable is unimportant. I like to claim that only the improbables are important. It's just that we don't know which improbable is important. And most people are too afraid to try, given the improbable nature of things. But you have to remember as entrepreneurs that only the improbable is important. I'd like to say you're also limited by what we think we can do, not by what we can actually do. Once you get started, you do a lot more than you would otherwise imagine. And I'd like to say major in disruption is mostly non-institutional. Walmart didn't disrupt retail. Amazon did. Media companies didn't disrupt media. YouTube and Twitter and Facebook did. Lockheed and Airbus and Boeing didn't disrupt space. SpaceX did. General Motors and Volkswagen didn't disrupt automobiles. Vamo and Tesla did. You get my idea. People like Google, the change they brought, cannot be done by institutions. And that's why it's up to you. Let me start with my favorite story. This is a company we've invested in, Impossible Foods. The scientist came to me and said, he'll give up his 10-foot tenure. He'll give up a Howard Hughes Fellowship, which is extremely rare, to work on solving the sustainability problem because animal husbandry takes up 30% or 40% of the planet's land area. And it's extremely resource-insensitive. A kilogram of beef might take 3,000 liters of water to produce. Today, he's in 1,000 restaurants in the United States. And his hope is it's cheaper, healthier, more sustainable, better, and much more scalable than any form of red meat, just when red meat consumption is growing, especially in places like India and China, as incomes improve. We're fortunate that today, lots of new tools and axes of innovation have showed up. Because of series of factors, there are many axes of innovation. As the axes of innovation improve, the possibilities for solutions increases because more combinations become possible. As we get more tools, the cost of experimentation goes down. And so you can try many more experiments even if most fail. And today, I find many of the tools for experimentation are exploding. New breakthroughs in many areas, and I won't go through all of them, are really changing the rate at which we can have innovation. And of course, some of the older tools, like internet, mobile, are still there and helping us build this new innovation environment. What's also promising to me is in the past, 10 years ago, if you look, most technologies, entrepreneurship was about technology areas. A better enterprise software, a better search engine. But today, almost all industries are subject to innovation. So let me get to the crux of what gets me really, really excited about the next 10 or 20 years, the thing I want to work on and the thing I want all of you to work on. So my appeal today is let's work on these. And I looked at the GDP in America and said, what are the non-governmental components of GDP that are open to individual entrepreneurs to change? Almost everything. Healthcare and medicine, food and food production, financial services. Let me talk a bit about some of them. Today we have the practice of medicine. It's better than it has ever been before. Compared to 10 years ago, 20 years ago, 50 years ago, medicine is much better. But it's small iterations on practice and learning from each small failure. But the science of medicine is just becoming possible. And I have a 110-page paper for anybody who's interested. You can Google 20% doctor included. Almost all diagnosis monitoring a patient's prescription should be done by AI systems. And that doesn't mean there's no role for humans. Humans should do the human element of care. And we can come back to that later if you want. The best discovery tools aren't from pharmaceutical companies. AI companies like Adam Wise and Deep Genomics are doing new tools and new ways of discovering pharmaceuticals or AI-guided surgery interventions. Of course, AI-based imaging. Data-driven personalized care. We restricted medicine to what humans could act on. So your physical is still the same things you checked 100, 200 years ago. Your blood pressure, your temperature, your heart rate, things that were measurable in the year 1800. We can go to thousands of biomarkers per blood sample. In fact, I know one company that does 300,000 biomarkers per sample of blood. All omics medicine. For those of you interested, I refer you to my paper. I won't spend too much time on this. But the key point I want to make is this is the only way medicine gets to be scientifically substantially better, but more and most importantly, accessible to everybody because that's as free as a Google search. It's more affordable and it's a great equalizer in access to medicine. We can create 100 million physicians inexpensively and virtually zero cost. I want to prove to you that every area is open for invention. If we have driverless cars, we'll open up cities. No parking lots, new housing. We can make small space much more functional. There's a company called Ori Systems that takes a 500 square foot or about a 60 or 70 square meter apartment. And by having transformer-like furniture, if you remember those transformer toys, make the same room into a bedroom or a desk or a living room. That's making space twice as efficient. Buildings and business models like WeWork and Airbnb are making buildings more usable, using them more of the time, more efficient. All of this is reinvention of space. My favorite and the one I appeal to, one of you to start, is 3D-printed buildings cost-effectively combined with generative design or AI-based design. It really is a massive opportunity. If we can reduce the weight of a building by 5x, we will reduce materials consumption by 5x. None of this 2% or 5% improvement in efficiency. It's 500% improvement of the cost of space, and then maybe 100%, 200%, 300% improvement in the effectiveness of each square foot. Today, the average car takes 1,000 kilograms per passenger, maybe for two passengers. If we could reduce, build crashless cars because they're driverless, they could be really, really light. Cars are built around crash protection and environmental. If there were public utilities, not private cars, each car would go 100,000 miles a year, not 10,000 miles a year. We'd need one-tenth the amount of steel, one-tenth the amount of tires, and we'd have all the bases to have all-electric cars because we'd want in high-utilization vehicles, high-cap-axe and low-op-axe, which is what electric vehicles offer. My assumption, we can get to a dollar a ride as a city utility. It'd be a great thing for a country like Finland to offer or experiment with in parts of the city. Combine that with trains, arteries, flying cars that will start to show up soon. It's a unique possibility. Manufacturing, new design tools, 3D metal printing, 3D composite printing, 3D investment casting, and robotics can completely reinvent the supply chain. We don't have to build things at the other side of the planet and ship them. We can do them locally on demand with low inventory. We can reinvent manufacturing. My favorite example is a small company, 3D printing shoes, after taking three pictures of your foot. One perfect fitting shoes for your exact foot. More importantly, all the materials are recyclable. If you know footwear, it's a disaster environmentally. We can eliminate that environmental disaster. So that's just one example, but it applies to everything. Rocket Labs, one of our companies, is 3D printing rocket engines. So both extremes from shoes to rocket engines can be done this way. Food can be innovated. I've talked about impossible food. We could completely free up land area. We've seen a lot of startups around AI for imaging and data from space. We had a company that eliminated herbicides and fields by weeding fields robotically using machine vision to identify weeds and weed them. Imagine if that was pervasive. We could eliminate herbicides from agriculture. That'd be a wonderful thing. There's, of course, vertical farming, lots of new ways to do denitrification of agriculture, decemicalization, decarbonization. But innovation can happen in financial services, too. I think one of the problems with all this technology and the one problem I worry about more than any other single problem is the income disparity and inequality caused by technology. But technology does also offer us the opportunity to make financial services available to everybody much more fair for everybody. Imagine an AI lawyer. So everybody could have free legal advice like some of us who can afford it can get. Lots of opportunity here. Energy decarbonization is the one problem that's among the hardest. Finland's a good country to come to because the two areas, nuclear, done right, without nuclear proliferation and without nuclear waste, which we are attempting with a company called TerraPower. And geothermal are two great solutions. Wind and solar are great, but it's not yet really feasible as base load power. But every aspect of buildings can be, and decarbonization can be addressed. The problem I see is the best PhDs at the best universities are no longer going in this area, and hence innovation is slower as an area of great need and urgency. It's one of the reasons we started breakthrough energy ventures. I won't spend much time on education, but I spoke earlier today about every child having an AI personal tutor. If we can recommend Netflix movies to people, why can't we recommend what thing to learn next? And as they're learning, if they're falter, if they're slowed down, if they're confused, have an AI tutor help them, guide them, hint for them. You can do personal advisors, financial advisors, elder care robotics, personal doctors. These are all massive areas society needs. Let me say to you, most, not all hard problems are valuable, but most valuable problems are hard, so please take on the hard problems. The way I look at it, I don't mind investing in something that has a 90% chance of failure if it's a transformative project, because a 10% chance of changing the world is a pretty good chance. I've talked about this problem, so I won't spend any time on it. This is one of my favorites. There are 3 billion people on this planet that nobody does products and services for. I urge you that this is a constituency we cannot leave behind. So let me stop there, say I find it, and we'll open it up to questions. So Anders, please come on up. But let me just say in the meantime, it is extremely rewarding psychologically to work on these problems. It seems extremely impactful, and I think, for entrepreneurs, it can be extremely, extremely profitable. But let me let you take some questions. Thank you, Vinod. Thanks, everybody. My name is Andreas. I'm representing Slush and you guys here and delivering a few questions that we have received during the talk. You're known as someone who is extremely well-rounded and can go into surprising depths on almost any technological topic. So I would love to start off by asking you about how much basic research do you read? How much do you spend time on reading? Well, so I spend a lot of time reading, probably hundreds of pages a week. I still read scientific articles every week. I collect what I can't read for reading once, one month a year, which is usually August. I also do a lot of writing. The talk I just gave is something I started writing in August. It's now a 50-page document. I'll publish it. It'll be probably called reinventing the infrastructure of society, just like this talk. But it's based on a lot of research. When I did my talk on 20% doctor included, there was 300 papers I went through just to write that document, which is 110 pages. Now, I have to say I really enjoy it, and I enjoy learning about 3D printing and rocket engines and agriculture. So it's really a lot of fun if you enjoy that kind of thing. It's not really work. Absolutely. I have to ask, why August for writing? Why August for writing? It's the slowest month. Other people take vacations. I do, too. But I do this on my vacation because it's the most enjoyable way I find to spend my time. OK. Also, another very practical. So let me just say one thing to answer those. It's important to be internally driven. There's people say, why don't you go sailing? I don't enjoy sailing. If I enjoy reading scientific papers, I do that. And I ask all of you to really let your internal preferences guide you. And too many of us get distracted by social pressures and what's expected of us. And don't follow our passions. Exactly. Another little personal question. How did your day look like 30 years from now, as opposed to today, a very regular day back in the Bay area? Well, I'm 62 years old. If I'm alive and healthy and I hope to be, I expect I'll still be working 80 hours a week. I enjoy this so much. I can't think of what else I would do. When I left, son, I actually thought I'd retire. And I have a passion for something that's sort of odd, which is furniture design. And I thought I'd want it to become a furniture designer. I still play around with design as a hobby, but I enjoy understanding all these diverse areas of technology and takes up all of my time. It's really, really exciting. Interesting. So why didn't you become a furniture designer? I'm sorry? Why didn't you become a furniture designer? Well, I got sucked into helping entrepreneurs. So I've never called myself a venture capitalist. I always say I'm a venture assistant. My mission is I was an entrepreneur multiple times. And my mission now is to help other entrepreneurs succeed. The money we do is incidental to the help we provide. So when we started our firm in 2004, we used as venture assistants as our tagline. Right. Interesting. And speaking of that, how do you evaluate talent? You know, evaluating talent brings me to a thing that's probably the hardest thing entrepreneurs do. It is the following. Trying to decide whose opinion to trust on what topic. It is the single hardest thing an entrepreneur does. Anybody you ask will give you advice whether they're qualified or not. And you don't know how to address that. If you're an inexperienced technologist and you ask a VP of marketing at a big company, they will know big company marketing building. They will have no idea how to operate in a startup. So how as an entrepreneur do you do this? Without going into it since we have limited time, let me suggest there's two documents I have on my website. One's called engineering the gene pool of a company. I spend a lot of time writing things to help entrepreneurs. The other one is called something like the art of hiring. And it talks about the kinds of questions you can ask to evaluate talent. Go back to your question. Fantastic. There was a question from the audience. How do you figure out whether it's worth it to spend time on a technology that seems impossible? Look, we can never know for sure. And because of that, most people fail to try. I'd rather try and fail than fail to try. And I like to say publicly that my willingness to fail is what has allowed me to succeed. And I think it's very, very important to have the courage and the courage of your convictions. That's very, very important. Usually, smart people can figure out and characterize all the risks. You can take an impossible-looking problem and say, what are the risk steps? I have another document on our website on how to manage those risks. And sometimes you have to do them out of order. So normal product development may be step A, step B, step C, step D, step E. But if step C is the biggest risk, I encourage entrepreneurs to say, hey, take that risk first and see if you can solve it. Because if you can't, that's the time to give up. And no, you can't do this. So risk management and taking on the largest risk first is just a management technique for entrepreneurs. I think it's not the way you systematically develop a product, but it's the way to fail at the lowest cost if you're going to fail. Exactly. OK. Good education, briefly. You've wrote a debated post about it. Kenny, work us still quickly through. What do you think the future education should look like? So I get asked often, what should young people do? If I look back at my life when I was in college in the early 70s, nothing I learned is relevant today. So one, you have to learn to learn and you have to learn to change rapidly. The basis for that is broad learning. So you might be an electrical engineer, but learn about neuroscience, take courses in psychology. Human psychology is important no matter what area you operate in because you're dealing with humans. Philosophical logic is a style of thinking. So happens that computer science teaches you very similar style of thinking. So if you're going to do a second language in many universities in the US, have a second language requirement, I always say, why take French? No offense to the French or Spanish. Take computer science as your second language because it's the language that the whole world is speaking more and more. You may want to learn a third language in a fourth. But I would say you have to prioritize correctly. You have limited time. And you say, whenever you say, let's do this, you have to ask what else not to do. Having said that, I think your original question referred to the blog I wrote on liberal arts. I have a blog on Medium that was about why liberal arts was the wrong education today. Liberal arts was invented in Greece when the slaves did the work and the Greeks sort of did thinking. It is not relevant today the way it is taught. The ideas behind it are still important. And the humanities are still important. But what is taught today and how it's done today is not important. So I wrote a response to all the criticism and responses I got called responses to my blog on liberal arts. I suggest anybody interested read that and tell me if they agree or disagree. It's a controversial area, but I think we need to invent a new subject called modern thinking that has components of economics, psychology, philosophy, or philosophical logic, computer science, the basic sciences, which were part of the original liberal arts, and other things that teach you how to think so later you can adapt to any new area that evolved. Exactly. Actually, I think this is a very good note to end on. I think for me personally, the Kostla Ventures reading list on the website has served as a fantastic piece of inspiration. So that's definitely at least worth checking out. Thank you, Vinod. Thank you very much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you, everybody.