 from Las Vegas, expecting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE covering Interconnect 2016, brought to you by IBM. Now your host, John Furrier and Dave Vellante. Okay, welcome back everyone. We are here live in Las Vegas for exclusive coverage of IBM Interconnect 2016, winding down day two, three days of wall-to-wall coverage. This is theCUBE's Silicon Angles flagship program. We go out to the events and they strike the signal from the noise. I'm John Furrier, my co-host Dave Vellante. Excited to kind of wind down the day with a great guest, Amy Wilkerson, she's the author of the book, Creators Code, lecturer at Stanford. Welcome to theCUBE. Thank you, I'm excited to be here. Thanks for taking time out of your book signing to come and join us because really loves to get into the nuances of entrepreneurship. And we're kind of in this new era, right? So there's always the entrepreneurial books of what's been told, are you born with it? Can you learn it? I mean, as you teach us all, maybe I won't be too biased, but my feeling. That's the age old story, entrepreneurship, but now it's accelerated, it's so fast, it's different and people are trying to understand it. What's going on with entrepreneurship right now? So it's a trend in the country, there's no doubt. The data actually shows that if we wanna create jobs in the economy, you have to start companies that will go to scale. So all the net new jobs are with companies less than five years old. So we're seeing the proliferation of entrepreneurship and creators are everywhere. And the book, talk about the book. So the book is called The Creator's Code. Let's see if you have the props. I've just been handed to me here, so that is what it looks like. It's based on 200 interviews with founders of companies, creators of new ideas that have scaled businesses over 100 million in annual revenue between five and 10 years. So founders of companies like LinkedIn, Airbnb, Tesla, SpaceX, Dropbox, PayPal, a number of Silicon Valley companies, but also looking across. So Chipotle, Chobani, Under Armour as a sports brand, Spanx as a women's undergarment company, JetBlue as an airline, et cetera. So I went out and talked to all these different founders to figure out the leadership skills they had in common. Let's apply some machine learning in real time here. What's the pattern recognition? Oh, the pattern, that's the code. The code, tracking the code. That's right. So what is the Creator's Code? What can you share? What is the habits? What do they do? What are the top things that entrepreneurs... We'll still get the book. Oh yeah. I just downloaded it. There are six essential skills, right? And I'm happy to go through them rapidly if that's interesting. Okay, so skill one is called Find the Gap. It's about how do you spot an opportunity or gap that other people don't see? Skill two is called Drive for Daylight. How do you manage speed like a race car driver so you look for the light on the horizon? It's forward focus. Skill three is called Fly the Oodaloop. And Ooda stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, Act. So it's a fast decision making framework. Originally it was an Air Force Fighter Pilot framework. How could you shoot down a competitor in 40 seconds or less? You would have to observe, orient, decide and act faster. Same thing in a business landscape, right? Skill four is called Fail Wisely. So this is about being smart and learning and learning through setbacks and testing ideas. Skill five is called Network Minds. So this is like how do you bring brain power to you? How do you harness cognitive diversity and get other people to help build on ideas to solve problems we haven't solved before? And then the sixth skill is called Gift Small Goods. And this is one of the ideas behind LinkedIn. We were talking about Reed Hoffman. The idea is a small good would be a small favor, a small kindness, a way to help a colleague. If you were generously gifting those forward, we used to say that it was morally right to be a nice guy or be a good colleague. Now it actually... Nice guy's finished, you know, first. Well, so I just wrote a piece for Fortune called Nice Guy's Finish First Not Last. Because we used to say, oh, nice guy's finished last. So, you know, you kind of get trampled on or you get people in front of you. In fact, now if you're collaborative and helpful to your colleagues, your reputation is transparent. We know, we can find information on LinkedIn or on social media. We can Google you. If you're helpful, ideas come to you, deal flow comes to you, talent comes to you. It actually makes you a lot more productive. That's the network effect, kind of in working towards somebody. That's right. So some of these are tried and true. You know, the classic Napoleon Hill power of positive thinking actually is not in here. Which interestingly enough, I don't know if it's explicit, you know, paying it forward, but the pieces that are really new are the speed. I mean, that has changed. Talk more about that. What did you learn and why is that? So, certainly technology is speeding everything up. So one of these skills is called Fly the Oodaloop, this Observe Oriented Decide Act framework. And the PayPal team is a great example of you have to observe things that other people won't see. There's a lot of academic literature here about alertness where people will catch something out of the corner of their eye, but often we're in our routine and you dismiss it. You know, so you might experience something but you completely ignore. The difference is you have to observe quickly. You have to orient quickly and make a decision quickly and then take an action. If you can do that, the PayPal team did it six times. So in 18 months, that company was six different things. They sold to eBay. The more interesting concept here is that the original 12 people at PayPal, they go on to start the whole next wave of the internet. And it's when the tech bubble burst in 2002, I was coming out of Stanford Business School at the time. It was doom and gloom in the valley. People just thought technology was over. Nuclear winterization. Oh, it was terrible, right? That team goes on to start LinkedIn, YouTube, Yelp, Yammer, Slide, Tesla, Dig, Genie. They've put the first money behind Facebook and the list goes on and on. And so when you actually dive in and say, well, how are you able to not only do this once, but over and over and over and you spend time with all of those different founders, what they start talking about is observing things that people miss acting quickly, deciding based on counterintuitive data, maybe, and taking action. Was it because they failed smartly or that they had the DNA of their experience with PayPal? Can you root it back? What observations did you take away from that? Because PayPal was a success. I mean, I mean, some would argue it could have been even more successful, but there are some stories of those guys kind of had the coming of age in PayPal. They were a bunch of geeks kind of hanging out doing their thing. But they had multiple near-death experiences, right? So PayPal almost didn't survive multiple times. So the formative years, was that a part of it? I think, well, yeah. So this is part of the idea. On the nature and nurture debate, I'm on the nurture side. You can learn, right? So this is the argument that, yeah, they learned quite a lot and then they took it forward in all the other companies that they started. So I think the skill set, the six skills, learnable, teachable, accessible, it doesn't require a credential or a degree or perfect timing. We heard on the Q world. That what? And what doesn't kill you makes you strong. Yeah, I think, well, this is, so the fail wisely idea is, failure is almost a badge of honor in Silicon Valley as long as you learn. I'm doing a lot of badges. Yeah, right. Here's the thing is you can't keep failing the same way. That is not smart. That's insanity. Right, yeah, that, you know, so if you are learning through setbacks and you're more resilient and you're gaining information and you're redirecting your course, that actually is pretty wise. And this other one, the network of minds. I can't wait to read the book. I eat the stuff up. I've been chasing windmills for a long time. And I think of, you know, the mastermind alliance, you've heard that one before, but what's, again, I'm looking for differences of the network can be a lot bigger, a lot faster, a lot more social. That's right. What can you tell us about how that sort of changed that network effect? So the idea of getting other brainpower to help you solve problems, we can do it online and we can do it offline. And so now there's a company in this book called Innocentive and they are sourcing different seekers and solvers to solve problems. And what Alf Bingham likes to say, who's the founder of Innocentive, is you can find the teenager in Romania who can solve your scientific problem. You can be sitting in California, you can be sitting in Las Vegas. If you can put out a problem and then define it specifically and set criteria around it, you can harness the brainpower of people who are very, very far away. That's new, that's totally different and it's fast. If you do it well, you can do it very quickly. It's addressable people. It's real-time communication with the way the web works now. That's right. Global, the world's flat, if you will. Right, that's right. Economics. Well, we heard a phrase in the Cube earlier this morning from a guest and it was talking about another topic, but the word paranoid and self-aware came up. So I can think of Andy Groves' book. Sure. You know, Paranoid Survived and being self-aware, which is kind of this new thesis of, hey, you know, be aware and observe. You learn, right. Talk about those, Dana, because that's kind of back to your observational thing. Paranoid people were like, oh my God, I'm a competitor, am I gonna get shot down? Right. You know, whatever metaphor. So those tied into this, because those are concepts that worked well in tell. You're right, I think that's true. So I think it's a lot about curiosity, which sort of dovetails with what you're saying. Paranoia, I'm not so sure. I mean, I think that that has been a mantra that a lot of people have thought about. That just is to stay alert and stay on your feet. I think it's creating new concepts, companies, initiatives, ideas. It takes a lot of confidence. So whether we call that paranoia or we call it believing that your work matters, persevering, grit. I mean, there's a lot of other words for it that are being used now. But I think curiosity is huge. So there is research that shows that an average five-year-old will ask about 100 questions a day. And then as we age, people ask less and less questions. The big difference with people who will create new concepts, business ideas, is they keep probing. So if you spend time with Elon Musk and he's featured in this book for Tesla and SpaceX and I've spent some time with him, he is filled with questions all the time. Can we build a reusable rocket? Can we land a rocket on a sheet of flame? Can we build a car with 7,000 tiny batteries? Why not? What are the constraints? How do we remove them? You know, I mean, it's just- Curious mind really is always looking for some intoxicating ingredient to feed that intellectual- So I think that that is the overarching sort of framework, I think. You have to be curious and you have to be willing to be uncomfortable and ask. So how's- I mean, IBM's got this whole cognitive cognition thing going on, which we love. It's got a big data angle to it. A lot of tech involves. And a lot of stuff we're talking about, we see every day in Silicon Valley to pay it forward. It's really a very community. It's a back channel. It's a front channel. Game of Thrones, whatever metaphor you want to use. But outside of Silicon Valley, how is the book being received? Because people want to emulate kind of Silicon Valley formula, but now you have this cultural shift where a 15-year-old in Romania could do something insightful and be part of a virtual Silicon Valley. Right. So give us update there, because Tina Selig talks about the same thing too. Sure. So the book is in all English-speaking worlds. Simon Schuster brought it out. I literally yesterday flew home from India and Sri Lanka. I've just spent the last six weeks in Asia. We released the book in Chinese in September, so China is 1.3 billion people. India is 1.2 billion people. Together, they make up 40% of the population of the Earth. Right. So I'm over there now. 1% penetration will be good on the book sales. Yeah, well, I mean, let's think positively about that, right? But it is a global economy that we operate in. The data set behind this book is US. And so still, if you want to start and scale a new idea that is all over the globe, Silicon Valley is a powerful place to do that. But I don't think that there's any reason to think that the next ideas are not coming out of Shenzhen or Shanghai or Bangalore or Mumbai or Delhi or, you know, I mean, we're going to see global innovation coming. I mean, in India and Asia, it used to be outshoring. Now, there are real product teams out there. Right. Real intellectual property being developed, meaning different politics and whatnot. But still, from a technology perspective. Right. Huge shift. And that wasn't like that 10 years ago. Yeah, there's an argument to be made that in China that Baidu and Tencent and Alibaba, they're three huge technology companies, are ahead of the US technology players. And there are different innovations that you see there. WeChat, for example, is a platform that would have online the ability to book a car, that would be our Uber, monitor your health, that would be our Fitbit, find a date, that would be Tinder, book a doctor's appointment, that would be the My Health Care, all the different platforms online. I mean, you can do all of that on one platform in China. So for example, that is ahead of the US marketplace, I think. So what is the new code that be cracked? So beyond the book, as you look forward, what's next? What is the dot that connects? Where's the arrow being shooting forward to? Well, here's one thing that I think is interesting about the research process behind this book, and then where it's grabbing some attention. And that is in the corporate space. So the data set here is founders of new companies. But there's a huge appetite that I'm finding it's somewhat surprising to me in how do you create inside a large structure? Is it the same skill set? And I think it is, it's the same six skills. But you can create and scale inside of IBM, that's pretty important, or inside of GE, or inside of a lot of the really big companies globally. And so I think that is, in many cases, the next frontier. And that's not the audience for whom you wrote this book. Who would you write this book for? You know, this is kind of pretty broad-based audience. And so it's definitely creators of new companies. And I teach at Stanford Business School. So there's a whole wave of, you know, next people that are coming into the marketplace. It is also, though, for people who are aged 30 to 50. And the data shows that an average first-time founder in the United States is 39 years old. It is not a 20-something wearing a hoodie in flip flops in Silicon Valley. So I founded my first company, 39. 39, is that right? Yeah, well, then you're right on, you know, on the trend. On the number. So we're like a lot of people. Two years ago? Yeah, just a couple years ago. Thank you very much. Yeah. And also what we're seeing in the US is that baby boomers are creating companies in greater numbers than their millennial kids are. And so that's counterintuitive. That's not what we think. But people that are living longer, they're, you know, wanting to have other experiences. Not everyone wants to play golf. They're happy to go out and start a company. And millennials tend to be risk-averse now because they're carrying big student loans. What's the business school vibe right now at Stanford? The business school has changed. I mean, you know, venture capital is changing. House, the funding's changing. The entrepreneurs seems to be off the charts. Computer science at Stanford sold out, basically, in the enrollment. Huge. Right. How is that changing in the business school? Are people like spring with ideas? Is it flourishing? I mean, are people like going crazy with all these new ideas? What's the vibe right now? Everybody's got a business plan, like Hollywood Express. Is it like that? Yeah, yeah. Is it, how robust is it in the business school? So Stanford is an amazing place to begin with. The business school is now all individualized curriculum. And this is what really distinguishes Stanford Business School from other business schools. I spent the last five years at Harvard, and I just have moved back to Silicon Valley to teach at Stanford. And that, I am voting with my feet. Let's just say that. I'm very happy to be back on the West Coast and I'm very happy to be at Stanford. What wasn't at the whole point of Stanford? Right, to build something better than Harvard. Well, or to build something new. To build something new into the very forward looking. The building is beautiful. The new business school? Yeah, it's a great center. Okay, so you voted me a feat. Yeah, what makes it great is the collaborative nature of it and the entrepreneurial nature of it and the personalized experience of it. So students, if they're interested in China, are doing exchange programs with China. If they're really interested in marketing, they can target their curriculum towards that. If they're really interested in finance, they can be going deep in finance very early. And so the MBA is becoming something that is individualized more and more. That's great. To what students are really curious about. I mean, it's back to this curiosity thing. So, and undoubtedly it's a place for entrepreneurs and entrepreneurship. Yeah, it certainly is. Stanford's a great campus. Love it. I live in, my kids go to Palo Alto High School right across the street. Just renewed my season tickets this year again. We just won the Rose Bowl. Absolutely, go coin one. Yeah, that was good. I love Stanford. They got a good football team. Well, thank you so much for spending the time and the book. We really appreciate it and congratulations. Thank you. See you around town in Palo Alto. I look forward to it. Visit school. This is theCUBE bringing you all the action, cracking the code, cognition, cognitive thinking, sharing the data. Amy Wilkinson, thanks for joining us, author here on theCUBE. We'll be right back with more coverage tomorrow. Day three, all the top guests are coming in tomorrow. Top players, all the leaders, the most powerful people in the enterprise tomorrow. We'll be right back tomorrow. I'll see you tomorrow. Right.