 Live from the Hilton at Bonnet Creek, Orlando, Florida. Extracting the signal from the noise. It's theCUBE, covering Vision 2015. Brought to you by IBM. Welcome back to IBM Vision, everybody. This is Dave Vellante with my co-host, Sam Cahane. This is theCUBE. We're here live in Orlando. Ben Casanoca is here. Noted author, entrepreneur, thinker. Ben, welcome to theCUBE. Thanks so much for coming on. Thanks for having me. Coming off the keynote this morning. You challenged the audience to actually think about themselves as entrepreneurs. You laid out a bunch of adjectives, all the things that we want to be associated with agile, innovative, entrepreneurial. And it was very inspiring. So thanks for that. And what's your overall message? Appreciate it. Now, our message is simple. The world of work has changed. The modern career looks different today. What it takes to succeed and get ahead, we think requires a different set of skills and talents than maybe prior generations needed. It's a very competitive age, very dynamic age, technological change, all the things we hear about and read about in the newspapers. So we believe that the best way to adapt yourself, the best way to survive and thrive amidst all these challenges is to study what entrepreneurs do when creating amazing businesses. Because when you create a business, you do so in conditions of great uncertainty, lots of change, lots of competition. So study how entrepreneurs adapt their businesses, study how entrepreneurs build networks, study how entrepreneurs take risks and then apply those very same skills to your career and think of your own life, your own career as a business of one, as a startup of you. I got to ask you, so a lot of the theme of this conference is essentially machines doing cognitive work to help humans do better predictions. But when I think about entrepreneurialism, so much of it, you asked the question today, how many people here would consider themselves entrepreneurs on a scale of one to 10, 10 being better than Steve Jobs? So obviously no 10s, and this audience a couple of sevens. But gut feel, you know, it's gut feel a critical factor for an entrepreneur. You mean intuition? Yeah, intuition. Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, whether it's man or machine, whether it's intuition versus analysis, the answer is usually both. So it's man plus machine equals the greatest discoveries and revelations and creativity and new ideas and adaptation. It's your intuition combined with thoughtful, cost-benefit analysis or whatever the analysis might be. And so I think maybe to your larger point, Dave, on how kind of innate is an entrepreneurial disposition versus learned skills, I think it's both. I think personality tends to be something that you're born with and certain personality types and inclination certainly lead somebody to be more or less entrepreneurial. But I also think there's a set of real skills, real strategies, specific ways that entrepreneurs, for example, devise a plan knowing that they're going to have to adapt the plan, specific ways that entrepreneurs tap their network for intelligence in order to make better decisions. And I think anybody is capable of acquiring those skills. Yeah, so I think of like my old boss, the self-made billionaire, Pat McGovern, he did a lot of research, he had a huge network, but he was sampling. But he was doing a lot of data gathering. So what's changed today? Is it just more data? The sort of, you don't have to do these little bits of sampling or is that kind of sampling still critical and you're complimenting that with massive injections of data? Well, you know, one of the things we say in the book, the start of the view is that we live in a networked age and we talk about the concept of network literacy. So, you know, one of the ways we think about the word literacy is how that, how the meaning of that word has evolved. So it used to be that literacy meant, you know how to read and write, right? Are you fluid in a language to read and write? And then this guy, John Battelle, coined a phrase about 15 years ago called search literacy. He said, reading and writing is important, but in the Google era, we need to know how to search. We need to know how to acquire information on demand on the web, and that's its own sort of literacy that's necessary to succeed in the modern age. And we take that one step further and we say you actually have to also be network literate. You have to understand how networks work around you. You have to understand how to map your relationships. In the Facebook and LinkedIn era, network literacy is really important. So when it comes to what's different today, I think one of the key things that's different among other things is that it is a networked age. People are driving business, people drive change, and with social networks and social technology, we're able to keep track of who we know, we're able to stay in touch with those people and we're able to kind of leverage those relationships to make great change happen. Fantastic. So I want to ask you another question from your book. So in your book you mentioned, it's always great to have a couple questions in your back pocket. And one of those questions that I used that I took from your book was what's the most interesting thing you've learned over the past few months? Yeah. And while you're here I wanted to ask, what's the most interesting thing you've learned recently? Yeah, so in the context for our advice there is when it comes to building relationships which we think is the ultimate entrepreneurial skill I mentioned in my talk, we think of entrepreneurs as solo heroes and in fact they're amazing network builders. And one of the questions you can always ask somebody interesting is what's something you've learned in the last year. I think I kind of prompt a conversation and also maybe gather some great intelligence about something. I mean for me the thing that I've been thinking a lot about recently is one of the interesting puzzles of successful people is how much they sacrifice in their life in pursuit of yet one additional accomplishment. So you have people who are incredibly successful, incredibly wealthy and yet they continue to sacrifice all the things that we know contribute to happiness. So sleep, relationships, family and so on because they want yet one more accomplishment. And so kind of the basic question I ask myself is how ambitious should I be or should anybody be? What is worth sacrificing in pursuit of making a difference in the world and trying to serve others? And I'm just amazed when I see some of the most successful people in the world continue to push on the margins. And that's I think a pretty fundamental like life philosophy question that I think we all will grapple with all the time but I'm especially grappling with it as I think about what I want to be doing long term. I was speaking to an entrepreneur recently whose company got acquired. And I asked him are you sorry now now that you know that you got acquired because clearly you could have like run this thing up and he said no, no way. I'm an entrepreneur and all of us want to win. That's why we're in this game. And I think the best chance at winning was my company getting acquired and I'm winning now. Yeah. It's I reminded of pro athletes who have this innate desire to win. Is that, does your research show that that there's this, you're talking about sacrifices. I think the thing is is I think we all a lot of entrepreneurs, a lot of athletes are very competitive and they want to win and they put themselves in situations where they can win. The question I wonder about is once you win, how does it feel? It often doesn't feel as good as you think it would. I mean, there is an amazing amount of research plus anecdote would reinforce when you talk to people, how is your life different? How much happier are you? How much more meaning do you have after they've sold their company, after they've won a championship? And the answers coming right on the heels of the event tend to be pure euphoria. But six months, 12 months, 18 months later, it's kind of back to how it was before. And that's why this theme of never enough, it's like you need one more accomplishment, one more success, oh, I'll be happier if I just have one more million in the bank. But is that the case, right? And to me, seeing that it sometimes isn't often the case is what's giving me pause when I think about why am I, is it worth being so ambitious and willing to sacrifice to get that one incremental victory? So you're talking about John Battelle's search learning, search literacy concept. The most interesting thing I learned in the last month or so I didn't realize that the greatest chess player in the world was not a computer. It's actually a combination of computers and human teams. Gary Kasparov formed these teams, and so it dawns on me that the creativity of humans complimenting machines has quite potential for entrepreneurs. And then you talked about reading, writing, the three R's, reading, writing, arithmetic. Are we teaching our students the right things? Do we need to do math in our heads? Do we need to do formal writing? Do we need to focus more on creativity and combining ideas? I think certainly more on creativity. I think the broader question to ask is do we need to put our faith in the formal schooling system? Or can we simply teach either at home or perhaps at school or in church or whatever the institutions are? A kind of instinct for self-learning and permanent growth. Because a lot of time is when we think about how to make the world a better place or shape a population we go to. How do we reform the school system? To me it's like someone's in K-12 and maybe higher ed, and they're 21 or 22 years old, and then we've got 70 years ahead of them when they actually need to continue to learn. People that think that, oh, now I've, whatever I've done in school is all I need to know. They're setting up themselves up for failure. So to me, the really interesting question is not what do we have in the curriculum, but how do we inculcate an instinct for lifelong learning so that when the world changes, when it's no longer network literacy, it's the next thing they're ready to succeed. Are entrepreneurs inherently autodidactic? Can they teach themselves? Is that a tree? Yeah, I see. Well, I think there is an inclination. I also think it's an instinct that you can learn. In a sense, sometimes by necessity, kind of throwing yourself into the deep end, I think people that will take a risk and realize, oh my God, I'm dead unless I learn this new skill, unless I meet this person. That tends to be a pretty quick way to force yourself to do something. So I think entrepreneurial people recognize and need to always be learning and they find it within themselves or they partner with people who can help them learn whatever it is they need to know in order to get ahead. So when you talk about continued learning, how do you personally get, do you read books? Do you go on the internet? What is your personal source for new information? Well, everyone's different in this, so we all learn differently, process information differently. I tend to be a huge consumer of written content. For example, one of the reasons I never enjoyed school was if you say shut up and sit in the back of the classroom and listen to people talk at you all day, I'm like, that's prison. I'm not learning very much, I have no autonomy, and so even going to conferences, I hate listening to speakers speak for the most part because I just don't learn that way. To me, far more efficient and effective to read a book, take notes, and then write about it. It's like the process of reading, the process of writing, and so I'll read books and then I'll write reviews of the book or I'll read books and then write notes about the book, and that's how I learn and process. I think the interesting question is like, there's some knowledge that we can acquire that's kind of, like I'm reading the Robert Caro LBJ biography series right now and it's like kind of fascinating history of a time in American history and a portrait of someone who was incredibly ambitious and sacrificed an awful lot to reach the peak of power. That's like, to me, useful knowledge to have. The day-to-day knowledge that I need to make a great decision, everything from the utterly banal, like where should I grab lunch in Orlando, to what's the right event that I should participate in, for those questions I learned through talking to my network. I'm literally searching LinkedIn for people who have the key, who live, like I searched LinkedIn, I actually were coming here, for people who live in Orlando. Who do I know in Florida? Or who knows something about the consumer electronics industry if I'm evaluating an opportunity there. So that's what I mean when I say network literacy. It's for the day-to-day decisions that require or benefit from subjective judgment or insight, it's tapping the network and that's the way I learned to make those decisions. You know, it's interesting, so many people criticize social media because we're doing this at restaurants all day, but LinkedIn is quite interesting in that, in the way you're prescribing using LinkedIn, search who you know in Orlando and pick up the phone, talk to them, text them, I mean, get in touch with them, interact with them. It's, I mean, the social media is just the first step towards a real, rich interaction. Maybe it's in person, maybe it's not, nothing precludes those avenues. The thing is, it's just, it's hard to remember who do you know and what do they know, and so all we're doing is just kind of making that more accessible to every person in the world. Right, you go to LinkedIn and say, oh, this person's the first connection. Then you think about, oh, do you know? Or it's a person's one degree away. You're part of the genius, and this is a big difference between Facebook and LinkedIn. I mean, LinkedIn, the architecture is out to the second and third degree, because introductions are very powerful, and so, oh, I don't know anyone in Florida, but Dave knows somebody who lives in Florida. I'll ask Dave for an introduction, and the notion that with an introduction, you can access almost anybody in the world with any set of expertise is very, very powerful. Well, on theCUBE, I've interviewed 6,000 people in the last five years, so I can't remember everybody I've met on LinkedIn, but I want to ask you about positive attitude. Do you see that as a sort of thread throughout successful entrepreneurs, the power of positive thinking, the Norman Vincent Peel. Yeah, it is hard indeed to think of entrepreneurs who are pessimistic about their life. I mean, in a sense, the true entrepreneurs who are creating companies, we argue this is a broader philosophy, but the people who are creating companies are almost likely optimistic about their circumstances. If they were just thinking rationally, perhaps they wouldn't embark on an otherwise quixotic expedition. I think the thing, I'm always interested in holding two ideas in opposition in your head at once, so in this context, I think optimism is really powerful, really important, and there's lots of research on positive psychology, and that's a new movement in psychology historically. It was this kind of field of negativity, and just in the last 20 years, people like Martin Seligman and others have written about positive psychology very powerfully. At the same time, one also needs to stare reality in its face, and sometimes do grapple with unfortunate circumstances, and how to both be optimistic and believe you can, but also know when it's time to quit. I mean, I've never liked entrepreneurs or advice givers that never give up. That's the key to success. It's like, no, actually, you do want to give up sometimes. Sometimes you do want to restart, and part of what judgment and experience teaches you is when to give up and when to persist. That's a hard thing to know how to do. Well, you know, the whole fail fast thing, but now, of course, you live in California and Silicon Valley, and so you kind of live in a distorted reality field, and so is that, a lot of people say to me, a lot of young entrepreneurs would say, had I known what I know now, I would have given up. But now I'm incredibly successful. Does that naivete, is that an advantage? I think so. I mean, there are a lot of people who are cursed by their knowledge, and that the ignorance is what enabled them to think they could do the impossible and take on the rest of the world. And, you know, VCs are in the business of backing those underdogs, people who, everyone's against them. Everyone's rooting against them, and they try to take on the world and change society for the better. So yeah, I do think that's a challenge that people have experienced, and that's why the famous Dune, the line from Dune of Beginner's Mind, is really, is a powerful idea. How do you cultivate the beginner's mind? How do you recreate the mentality that you had when you were young? And I always love the Picasso quote of, you know, we're all born artists and it gets beaten out of us as we get older. And I feel like sometimes it gets beaten out of me. I mean, I think it was one of the, another gripe I have with the formal schooling system, and like it does beat the creativity out of you as you do road test after road test. So how do you recapture it? How do you go back? And, you know, I don't have, I don't think there is a silver bullet, but to me, one of the ways I try to do that is by surrounding myself with people who think that way. We're social creatures, we absorb the influences of others. And if I ask you who are the five people you spend the most time around, I probably can tell you quite a lot about how you think and why you think because those people are influencing you. And so if you want to be more optimistic or whatever, think about who's in your network, think about how they're affecting you. So, let me ask you, Ben, to talk to our audience, talk to the young people out there, sort of summarize your premise, your thinking, your advice to these people in terms of many, many, many folks in our audience want to be entrepreneurs, they're aspiring, they're passionate, they take risks, they're willing to take those risks. As I say, they're not married and don't have four kids. So, good time to take risks. Yeah. What do you tell them? You know, I think there's rarely advice that applies universally to everyone in every circumstance. So, you know, perhaps the meta kind of cop out answer would be first know yourself and know your circumstances and understand what your own limitations are in realities. Not a cop out, that's great advice. Don't just dive in off the cliff, we don't understand what the water level is. Exactly, my co-author Reed has a line, which is, you know, when you start a company, you're just like jumping off a cliff and building an airplane on the way down. And, you know, what I often add to that is, yeah, but you don't just jump off any cliff and you tend to try to have the toolkit in your backpack when you jump off so you can actually start building the plane effectively. And, you know, you give some thought. So, yeah, I think there's this misconception of like, I want to be an entrepreneur but I can't because I have a job or I can't because I don't have a lot of savings and people think like, yeah, to be an entrepreneur means you max out your credit cards and just take massive amounts of wild risk. And it's like, no, it doesn't mean that. In fact, you want to take incremental risks, you want to take small steps, you want to be experimental, you want to start a side project, you want to be learned by doing, iterate. And you can take baby steps and inch your way towards whatever your dream company is. Most important, I think, through everything, you know, if you had to pick a universal force that transcends, it comes back to the theme we've been talking about, which is, you can't do it alone. You have to work with others. You have to have a team of people around you. Life's a team sport. And so, who are the people closest to you? Who's supporting you? What does your family think? What do your friends think? Who are your mentors? I mean, for me, in my own life, I was just absolutely key. I think everybody who's had successes or failures point to the people around them as the reasons they were able to be their best self. And a lot of young people say, well, I don't know anybody, right? And I don't know anybody who could help me. And the great thing about the internet today, and that was kind of my case, I didn't know anybody who'd started a company, but I was able to go online and connect with people. It used to be, if you were stuck in Timbuktu and didn't know anybody who could help you, you were kind of screwed. Today you can go online and connect with other people anywhere in the world. I mean, the first person I worked with lived in Bangladesh, of all places. And he was amazing. And so, there are communities out there, outside your physical geography, tap into those communities, build your relationships, have a support network. You'll really need them. The network is the computer and the network is the power of the entrepreneur, Ben Casanoca. Thanks so much for coming to theCUBE, really. We appreciate your time. Thank you. All right, keep right there. Everybody will be back with our next guest right after this. This is theCUBE, we're live from IBM Vision, Orlando. We'll be right back.