Problems that havent yet been solved. So thats what i call the perfect problem because that, in fact, is the focus of what i think entrepreneurship is. In other words, you are looking for a way to solve a problem that is solvable but hasnt been done. You had to do something you and you dont get to copy. And so we were then taken around for ideas and you do not have an idea and i didnt have an idea so we started looking for problems that we can solve and came up with the problem of how they got paid. When did you come to that conclusion, you talk in the book about your work, tummy about that moment that payments were a problem for small merchants. It was funny because as i said jack had been kicked out of twitter and my first reaction to that was jack was like a little brother to me, somebody felt like i needed to stand up for and what they did to him at twitter the first time was completely bile. So my first suggestion was lets go to San Francisco and get even with those guys. It was like spite motivated but jack to his credit said when we do something more positive and starting a company. We were looking for problem that our property was going to be focused on my phone i have to use it as a prop, these things, we were to focus on these things because the iphone had just come out and we knew is going to be important so we hired an engineer for apple, that give us two weeks to figure out what we were going to do. And we cannot think of anything. We were stressing for ideas and i went back to my glass studio. I make stuff nobody needs, the stuff that nobody needs, matteroffact in d. C. I used to teach a clinical park, for the cspan viewers, if you been to the park 20 years ago i was the guy that taught you how to make a paperweight. But the point is, i was in my studio and trying to sell a piece of glass and i lost the sale because i cannot take an American Express card. I was angry, i lost this great windfall and i was talking to the lady about one of these devices and i have this attitude towards devices like this which this device is a magic device, turns into anything i want, they wanted to turn into television becomes a television, turns into a map, radio, and will turn into the book, literally tomorrow. It will turn out to the book, it did not turn into a credit card. And so i was angry but i was also motivated to fix that, so i called up jack on that device and said lets make her iphone turn into a card machine so thats what became square. So the name of the book is innovation stack, what is the innovation stack and how did you learn about that from square. And innovation stack is not something we knew about when we started square but its probably the most powerful phenomenon that acm business and we stumbled across but the innovation stack is simply a way of interweaving inventions together, sometimes very simple but put enough of these together and they start to take on their own life and they create new industries, if you look throughout history at the Great Industries that i did not know any of this, i had no idea that any of this is happening in a matter of fact i wrote this book and i was having people reviewed like yourself and one of the greatest components i got was from a very successful, the skies living in, we were in his living room and he has a painting on the wall that is worth more than my house. I was like oh my god, im all intimidated and is asking me about the book and he finally said i wish i had known this when i was 20 years old. And i was like me too. It turns out theres this thing that happens, this process that can happen when you start to solve a perfect problem, something that has not been solved before because most of what we do is copying and most of our tools and training and comfort with solutions that exist, when you get out of the world of copying, you can build something that is truly different but the process is different, it creates a thing called innovation. If you build an innovation stack, at least in my studies company will dominate the world. It will run whatever business you are in. In the book when you talk about innovation stack, it was interesting that you focused on companies that we dont associate with tech, they draw the parallel between tech and innovation, you focus on southwest, ikea and others. Why did you decide to focus on those companies outside of the tech industry. Im a scientist by training and my father was a scientist, ive been very steeped in the scientific method, if youre going to do a reasonably controlled experiment, you need to eliminate variable. One of the most powerful variables is the phenomenon of viral growth in technology. So if you look at the potential for company that does nothing really that interesting but add sufficient technology to an old business, you can get outside success. I do not want to study that, what i did when i saw the pattern of innovation stack i want to Study Companies but i dont want to Study Companies like google. The only thing google their whopping they successful or amazon, all these companies are fantastically successful but what is it that creates success, in some cases just the pure disruptive nature of technology overwhelms anything else. So this is why i laugh when people studied Google Business practices, they can find their own space program. Which is tremendous but their management can be crummy and is still such a powerful force of technology. So i wanted to exclude that, if you exclude that what youre left with is businesses throughout history that built an innovation stack that has still dominated their industry. So i go back and start 100 years ago and work forward just to show that the pattern is something systemic in the innovation and not just a result of having Amazon Web Services and viral growth. Some people who see this book on the shelf might be surprised to learn that actually started as a graphic novel, can you tell us a little bit about that evolution. I did not want to write a business book. I dont particularly most Business Books are very boring, they are the ponderous selfserving tones, theyre not scientific, so i saw this and i thought i had to share this. This thing. And i did not want to write a business book so i started looking at the stories of these companies that had done this and the stories were epic, they were fantastic and so i was like i dont have to tell as a business, this can be a graphic novel. So what i originally sold to penguin was a schizophrenic manuscript that was a graphic novel in text and flip back and forth randomly and penguin liked it or i should say pretended that they liked it because they signed the contract, once they sign the contract, they own the book. So then they took me to this windowless Conference Room in manhattan and had a little talk, the talk went like this, you realize that your cute little comics are not going to show up on a 4inch screen. And people besides that are going to listen to this as an audiobook so as an audiobook its useless, you cannot take a graphic novel and reduce it to an audiobook. Right there you will lose 70 of your audience. If you want to lose 70 stick with what you got otherwise you have to rewrite it. So they were right, so i rewrote the whole thing but i still had all these great comics. So i actually made my own comic, she has her book and i have my. This is for you cannot buy the thing if you go to my website all give you the copy because like this is a storybook banker. This is a banker. There is a murder, there is a murder on that page and a funeral and heres the destruction of a major city, this is comic book stuff and the reason he wanted to do a comic was the tail of entrepreneurship and the details of the companies that build intubation stack ten to be really good stories because theres a lot of failure and failure actually makes really good stories, nobody wants to hear about success, boring. But failure, how did you get that scar, thats a good story. So i wanted to tell in this format and although theres only one chapter that sorta survived in the comic, if you buy the book will give you the comic, i will not sell this but you can have it. In their good stories, they are fun and so often i find that we ignore the fun part of what its like to do something that has not been done because theres a lot of failure and you have to have a sense of humor but mistakes, everyone is talking about that. On the point about the comic book, i know only one chapter has turned into a comic book now but it seems to me reading this if you were to write the comic book about square the billing would be amazon. Yes. Can you tell me what it was like when you realized that amazon was trying to directly compete with you and the payment space. Yes. Believe me i appreciate the irony of dissing amazon when youre in the middle of selling a book. [laughter] i will redeem myself at the very last Second Period so yeah, amazon did what they do which is they look through our market, decided that they wanted it and they take it. They do to things, they copier product, three things, they copy your product, they undercut your price biome is 30 and then they add whatever else they have like the amazon brand and a couple hundred million customers in all the stuff and then they want you to die. This was four years old, they would brand the playbook and so we were terrified and we went looking for solutions that we could copy to respond and we looked around for all the companies that had beaten amazon when they have been attacked this way, there were none. Netflix had already giant but startups, forget it. 0. 0 started setting on or that we could find had to live the attack by amazon. So you are truly alone. And it was terrifying. We looked at what we can do, there is not even that much we can do but amazon was undercutting us on prices, they were being amazon. And we were terrified. But there was not really much that we chose to do differently so we looked all our options and looking all the options we realized that they were all being done for very good reason so we just kept doing it. And we did not even maximum price of amazons price was 30 lower than our price and we did not match their price paid we kept going. And it lasted for about a year end half and a thing and on halloween of 2015 amazon gave up and they mailed all of their former customers and little white square reader. I cannot believe it. I cannot believe it. This never happens. This does not happen. But its what happened and thats actually what led me to the book because of somebody whos raised a scientist, i needed an explanation. I needed why did this happen, you cannot just be lucky, there must be some phenomenon and it turns out square had innovation paid we did not know at the time and there was no label of the innovation stack and there was a bunch of reasons that i had not seen it but once i saw it i was like that is it. Thats what a lot of us to survive amazon and would allow all these other companies that i study to survive vicious attack, you dont think amazon was bad but what happened to Southwest Airlines was worse, we did not end up in federal and state court, herb keller had it worse than i did. I wanted to ask you, you looked around and you cannot find other companies that had been able to be amazon and in the book you also say that you found some people who amazon beat but they werent willing to talk to on the record about it. So i found many amazon victims and talk to them personally. And they got their stories and then said thats great, can i quote you, no. Nobody, even people who were in totally different industries, even people who are industries now competing with amazon, everybody was so afraid of amazon that nobody would go on the record. I have 0 on the record first in the book about what happened with amazon. Why are people so afraid of amazon . You have to ask them, i dont know. Thats not for me too share. I will tell you that it was so severe that i could get nobody to go on the record. So theres no quotes. Just me. Right now were sitting in washington where theres a ton of scrutiny of the Larger Tech Companies on antitrust grounds at the moment when you look at congress, stc, do you think the amazon is monopoly . Not a monopoly in the traditional sense but i think they definitely exhibit some of the behaviors of market dominance. And im not a lawyer, i dont have a legally valid opinion on this but any company that gets big enough that it can move markets to be looked at and again, im not a regulator. I guess i kind of am now, i sit on the step, im a big believer in regulation, i think regulation is probably good in a lot of situations but on the other side these tech platforms and amazon a particular are very good at keeping the customer in mind. I think what youre looking for is a tech platform that gives very, very powerful that still maintains a semblance of responsibility, i think amazon has kind of done that and google has kind of done that in phase because kind of not done that so they deserve regulation at different levels. I want to ask about apple because square could not exist without the iphone and later much of the business relied on ipad, how do you think about them in that context. Apple is superpowerful, there really important to get along with, they also have great intubation and i got tremendous respect for apple, we built our Company Based on the apple had introduced to the world which was this thing, thats an apple invention. So i have a tremendous around a respect for them but also not 70 want to piss off, you dont want to do stuff that we did in the early days which couldve upset apple a lot, we bypassed the connecting thing on the bottom and we put the square reader into the microphone jack and that was a no, no, we were not supposed to do that and we thought we would get in trouble with apple but then we thought our products are so cool the be good with it. Because steve jobs at the time who is in control of apple had a way of protecting privacy in a steve. You are cool, you are fine. Lawyers would leave you alone. So we approach steve to save our butts. Tell me a little bit about the design of square in that process of creating such an iconic design that people recognize that in the smithsonian. The square card reader which is about this wide, the one that i built was smaller. It had a basic design flaw. It was one that i noticed and i chose not to correct. Which was when you were swiping a credit card through it was so narrow that the card would wobble as it would go through and as a result of that it would result in a mystery. About 80 of the time in about a it would work. In the 20 would not. This is a result of my testing. Dissolve the problem i built another reader that was not wide and tested it and everybody was 100 without. So the question is why did we build a tiny little device that did not work as well as the big device and it was not for cost reasons or anything like that. Interpret the reaction was very different. If i use the big device, people were like another credit card reader, if i use the small device, one is in the smithsonian they were amazed. They were blown away. What just happened. Remember the first time you saw a car go through a square read reader, you were impressed, everybody was impressed, and got your attention so we took a gamble was great to build a product that mechanically did not work all that well as it could. But it just got your attention and will you away and looked so cool and was fun to having people were talking about it and we were like we have to go for the cool. So we built something that was super cool and to this day squares routers, they would work better if they were wider but they are cool, they are great. And the funny thing is it turns out that the 80 number really drops after a little bit of practice, went to practice youll always get a good reader. So we discover by making a product it was lessthanperfect, we trained customers to use our product and then once they were using it they were showing up to difference how good they were and swiping the square. Thats a major gamble and reminds me of one part of the book of distinction between entrepreneurs and business people. Can you talk a little bit about that. So i was trying to discover what allowed square to survive amazon. In the process i sell the thing called innovation stack, i wanted to tell the world, i have to draw this or right is but i have to tell the story. I immediately realized that the english language does not have a word for this process that i was describing in the process i was describing was building a business but not a business that has been done before. So how do you describe someone who goes out and starts a business, thats an entrepreneur but i have a friend of mine who started a Coffee Company and hes an entrepreneur, he opened up a Coffee Company, he has coffee shops. But coffee shops have been around for centuries. You know how to make a coffee shop and if you dont how to make a coffee shop you can go to a tradeshow where they will teach you all the stuff you need, hire the spender to set up your expression machine, coffee is a soft problem. How do you differentiate Something Like that to somebody who is doing something that has been done before. I have another friend trying to launch satellites, hes my old russian fighter planes stripping the crab out of them, loading them with a missile and send them 90000 feet, put in a mock two power dive and pulls up at the last second so he has all this Kinetic Energy any 70000 feet up and fires a missile, when you fire a missile that high dont need to have a very big missile because theres so much energy to begin with. He think they can launch satellites cheaper. Where is his tradeshow, where as in buying russian fighter jets and sending them to the stratosphere. There is nothing, hes living in a different set of rules. He is living in a world where i needed to be able to describe that, it turns out the word entrepreneur was originally used and popularized to describe the person whos doing something new and weird and it might not work. It was the original use of the work, it has since come to be mean business, you can say youre an entrepreneur because you started the business, thats correct used today. But the agent use, the 100yearold use, economists are using 100 years ago. It meant somebody was doing something different. So in the book i go back 100 years and i say were going to use this word but were going to use it in a definition because thats only word that we have that i can used to describe it and i wanted to be able to differentiate what it is like to not copy. I think i did not want to write the book, it was a pain in the ass. A muscle writer and it was tough for me. I would not like to do it again. But i had to write this because i looked for the explanation phenomenon that i had seen, nobodys ever explained it and then i said why, how will lakes plain, theres not a vocabulary to clean up the part you want to talk about. So i needed to dust off the old definition of entrepreneur and then go and find examples that supported my thesis. When did you realize you yourself well into the category of entrepreneur versus business person crymac im still realizing, entrepreneur are people whose Health Problems that have not been sold before and sometimes failed to solve problems that are not sold before, im not not cut it right, i have a lot of problems and still have solutions to. But ive also had the fortune of doing some stuff that hasnt been done and having it work and then seeing the results and the results are tremendous. It is just a great thing when it works, when it finally works because typically at least the path of taken, failure, failure, something kind of succeeds but that creates two other problems, you do that enough, one of two things will happen, you will either die because you run out of energy or resources or time or you will succeed and when you succeed you will basically be in possession of a thing of innovation stack. You will have done so many Different Things in those Different Things will interrelate and influence each other, that what you have will look like nothing else in the market. It will behave like nothing else in the market, even when amazon decides to copy what you just did, they will not be able to, even amazon with all the resources and talent they cannot do it. This pattern is what creates Great Solutions to new problems. You mentioned earlier that you know jack dorsey since he was a High School Student and was working for your company. Tell me when did you first realize that he had some of these qualities of an entrepreneur . He had the first quality demonstrated the first night because we made him pull an allnighter since the day he was hired we were in a panic and made a giant air in a matter fact that so we got to him because we were who were enough everybody from around the location where our company was. His mother ran the coffee shop the traffic colored espresso beans to keep everybody awake this was before ritalin was widely available. So we would stay awake by munching on caffeine. And marsha sold us the beans and she let us hire her son, i think she regretted it because we sent him home at 5 00 a. M. That morning on his first day of work. [laughter] so thats wind that jack. Quality one, tenacity, got it. Survive on little sleep, got it. I later discovered that jack is just incredible incompetent prehe is quiet, hes not a bombastic person. But he is really good. It just shows there. You mentioned earlier that you have a brother like relationship with him and youre so defensive of him the first time at twitter, what your thoughts now with the recent activist investor push once again to potentially push him out of the company and what are your thoughts about that . Come on, you guys have tried that before, theyve kicked them out twice, let him run his company. You kicked them out front it didnt work, you kicked him out a second time, it didnt work you didnt kick him out the third, they came to some terms. Who else but jack is going to run twitter well. They think that twitter i dont know anything about twitter, i dont have anything to do the company but i would say this, jack is a fantastic leader. Hes a guy who things very deeply. This whining about the fact that hes running Public Companies what could go wrong. I think square has been phenomenally successful and i see why he worked there, i assume hes working at his other company and i would leave them alone. Got it. What do you think it is about him that gives him the ability to run versus a Large Company successfully. He is single. [laughter] single and no kids hurried asked my friend, are you married . I am not. All the married folks would get it. If i said you cannot have a family, you cannot have kids but have to run another company, no problem. Im not saying the family is not a good tradeoff but im saying actually thats why left square, i had my first child and i could not work 12 over days anymore, i would not know my kids. It was not fair for me with all the other people working those hours for me too stay around and go in eight hour day and since you guys. I couldnt do that. Thats when i left, after my son was born. So yeah i think jack, he is a tremendous work ethic. But hes not dragging along a minivan full of sippy cups. You mentioned your departure from square, i wanted to ask how did your life change when the company ipo. Ipo, i was all of a sudden taller than i was ever in my life. People start tuning indifferently, my life didnt change all that much because i was living in st. Louis, i had already paid off most of my debts so i was not in debt. It turns out going from a lot of debt to know that is a big deal, going from no debt to a lot of money isnt that big of a deal, i dont spend that much. That was weird. The people started treating you differently. I notice this is probably the biggest downside, i stopped getting good feedback. So i just spent three years writing about and i think its a good book but i cannot tell because everybody says jim your book is great and im like well i think if i was my old self when i was much grumpier and sort of less known i would probably be getting more feedback than the book might suck. You read it, but you dont have to be honest, the cameras are on. Its a fascinating account of your own experience and also about your research into so many other founders was fascinating as well. I hope its not about me, the book is not about me, you dont want to buy a book about you. The story squares good but the reason i included the story is twofold, one is support the thesis into a have firsthand knowledge. I have complete firsthand, you cant get in anywhere else knowledge what it felt like i say. But the rest of the book, by the way i was going to write unless i found examples of the phenomenon elsewhere because otherwise its me talking about me and thats boring. So its not a book on square, its not a book about me, its a book about a phenomenon that allows us to create square even though we did not know what it was. And you would say if you build square without knowing what it is, why is it important to know, the answer is it gets back to the core and the reason i wrote it, i know, i wrote this when i was writing and typing the words i had a person in mind, i know who she is shes incredibly incompetent. She is so good, she is so much potential but shes one of these people who disqualifies herself from trying to do new things because she doesnt have any qualifications to do the new thing. It is heart breaking. Being qualified is the right answer if qualification is possible. But if it is not then youre in my world, then youre not to renew her and then you will do stuff that will give you an example. I want to fly home today, my friend fumio. , he is an old plane. If i want to take control of the plane i have to go get certified, take 40 hours of training, pass all these tests, i hassled the stuff to make me a qualified pilot and even then i can link my certain times. That is good. Would be bad for me too get this plane and sale take over from here, schoonover. Today you can be qualified pilot and you should be but what about the wright brothers. What about the first person who ever flew, how is he going to do the thing, he doesnt know, he does not know if its possible. He doesnt know because there can be no qualification to be a pilot because nobodys ever been in a pilot rebuilt the plane. So you have two pilots, the pilot of 2020 better have a medical and all the stuff that they need, the pilot of the first rights flyer could not be qualified back to my friend. She has been raised and trained as we all have that we need to be qualified to do the things. Getting wealthy, checking the box. Learn from people who know it better than you, all the stuff, printers. Thats good, thats a weight should be except in the case if youre doing something has not been done, we have so many problems in the world that have not been solved yet that if we have great people like my friend who i really wrote the book for, disqualifying themselves because they dont feel qualified in a situation where theyre never going to be a qualified, nobodys ever going to feel qualified that hasnt been done. Ive done a bunch of stuff that hasnt been done, every time a hand sweat, i get nervous and im never qualified, what is i qualified to start a payment system, i knew zip about payments. Jacks only professional potential, hes a massage therapist. Right, the biggest bank in the world started with a guy who is a produce vendor, he so loved us. And the guy who is 17 years old kicked out of his own country but 17yearold started to big Furniture Company in the world per hes not qualified to do this. But it turns out qualification is effectively irrelevant if you doing something new so i just wanted to reach out and give a taste of what its like and then stories hopefully will entertain you and make you feel when you are in the middle of doing something that you are not qualified to do that its okay and the others were also not qualified to do the great thing were in similar situations. What did it feel like when you are at the very beginning of starting square in realizing how much he needed to learn about the payments based, i remember one antidote in the book where you working on the product and you realize i think were breaking about 17 different laws right now. [laughter] so how did you overcome that hurdle. I ignored it, we ignored it, i stopped counting at 17. We discovered on the very first day that what we were doing was against all the rules and i was like what were doing is illegal. And it turns out there was not just illegal oneway, and violated 17 different rules and regulations and visa required you to handle the card present transactions to all of our banking relationships and tons of stuff, and 17 laws in roles and rags. Which transcends complied with. I say that in washington. We are now compliant and heavily audited, but it took us a urine have to get complied. So we built anyway, we turn the machine on even though the machine was not licensed, there was no certification when i plugged the first grade reader into the first iphone. But there was also no spark an explosion. So it turns out it worked, the system worked in because the system worked, we just have this thing that we can point to to get the people to laws needed to change to accommodate us to change those laws or rules. We tried to change her system to be compliant with the whole system but there were a few cases where we absolutely were in violation of something in order for square to exist, we would go to them and show them this beautiful thing that worked, its just that it violated the rules that you need to change the rules. And they did not. Another founder in your book that starts out in a highly regulated space and have to break rules of the beginning is the founder of Southwest Airlines and those are some of the most fascinating parts of the book in your trip down to texas and tell me a little bit about that, i know he passed away a year ago, we would love to hear your thoughts on his legacy in the business world. I so miss herb keller, he was so generous. I probably got the last living interview with him. At least the last one i ever heard. He woke me down to Southwest Airlines because at the time had a theory and i had all this historical data, all the great data from history, the rate thing about that, guys who died in the 40 cant argue with you, if im dead wrong he will not return from the grave to go on cspan and contradict me. Its not going to happen. Thats a copout. I had this theory and i wanted to take my theory and hold it to somebody who has been there and say you have lived through something what was like incredibly generous, she was super fun, he smoked two packs of cool menthols when we were down there and this guy said hell yeah, same thing happened to me, only worse. Every story that i had, doing something nasty to square, he had five that were worse, herb was like watching the world through a magnifying glass, like a smokefilled magnifying glass. He was so cool and so fun and he reminded me of how much fun it was and i tried to capture that in the book and i had a whole graphic novel thing ready for her and i was like her by gotta make your superhero. And i asked for the permission to do that and herb said no. He said he felt it was not dignified. So i was like okay, herb did not want to be portrayed but one man, what a Great Company they built. If you know what the world of air travel was like before southwest, it was an exclusive problem of the rich you could only fly if youre rich. And the government and the wisdom concluded the only rich people wanted to fly because they studied all the rich people in the plains, so they figured only rich people wanted to be on planes. But what if you offered this kind affordable care, would you want to visit his grandmother. Herb change so many lives, probably saved so many lives, people that can go on southwest and get Cancer Treatment at Cancer Centers where they have the right equipment and they can fly back to be there family. These things are lifechanging, you build innovation, you do this and you will materially improve the lives of millions of people, herb was a living example of that. Im so sorry we lost him. Theres a great story in the book when youre getting out of this car you pick up a cigarette pack off the ground and he finds it for you. I never asked for an autograph in my life, but i got friends in the nba, i would never ask for an autograph, i was so starstruck herb that i wanted his autograph and a filament notebook so there was no space left and is driving me to the airport in his car and its full of empty cigarette boxes, i grabbed a cigarette box and handed it to the man, will you autograph a pack of cool menthols for me and he was like sure. So he grabs a pin any signs it, thats my most prized possession. Its sitting in my office. Very special. You mentioned the innovation stack can change lives, when you think about that what do you think the legacy of square is and how to change peoples liv lives. Square has allowed people to go into business for themselves, were right in the middle of the coronavirus, life is when you change folks. And a lot of people working for Big Companies may not be working for them after a while and selfemployment is a valuable option only if you can get paid. Let me tell you if you sell something that cost more than 100, nobody carries that much cash anymore and checks are basically dead. If you dont take an electronic or plastic from a payment you will not get the money. Square by enabling the basic tool has started this process and then we piled on by adding all these fantastic tools so that now iran my graph studio using the dozen different square tools to loyalty programs, i dont want to square commercial, and no sound about that. Now i have a small committee, it allows me too compete with these apps. I do the stuff that theyre doing, i dont have to worry about having the best hr system because square will help me handle that. So you give tool to the Little People and they can compete with the big company. So thats what i find so gratifying when i see a Small Business person who is doing what she loves to do in the business is working and shes got this thing that shes doing and selling and were making easy for her. She can ignore the rest of it. That is lifechanging. Tell me a little bit about when she stepped back from square d today, moved to st. Louis, you started a nonprofit. Yes orange code. So st. Louis had a problem, big deficit of programmers so we needed programmers in a matter fact jeff and i had an office in st. Louis that we closed because we cannot hire enough programmers in my hometown which is heartbreaking because i wanted to gray to be partially located in my hometown. As i move back i learned the problem is sort of interesting because it turns out the education does not work in computer programming. He works everything else, if we need welders we can train welders and the undersupplied welders will go away. But if you need programmers and say they went to school for programmers, for some reason that does not work, the problem has been getting bigger and a shortage of programmers has been getting bigger for the last 20 years. Last 30 actually, we had plenty of training during that time, the problem with training, a bunch of problems, the main problem that employers wont hire newly meant to programmers because they could do to much damage if they dont know what theyre doing. They have no experience though get a job, no job and they dont get no experience. Its a catch 22. So we started lunch code, lunch code is a Free Training Program that gives you the skills you need for free but the most in. Think about lunch code is that we started not as a Training Program but as a job placement system. So if you had the skills, lunch could we get you the job no matter what your credentials were, we figured out a way, we hope and innovation and we figured out how to please people with confidence coding skills but zero experience into a company that doesnt hurt the company. Were not asking companies to be nice or kind were paid forward or any of that crab, pure greed motivated companies, higher lunch coders because it isnt good for those greedy companies. It is greed based. That job placement we coupled with education and we had another intubation which is make it free. Turns out free innovation which is launch codes stack im sorry Free Education which is part of the innovation stack is magical because it does two things. It opens up the doors to everybody and we find talented people everywhere, people you would not expect, people you would look at or test or they wouldnt look or test the we would expect but the great and we can prove their great and Free Education and kick aspect. Its a fantastic program. What about the skepticism and the beginning of the interview about Business Books. Yes, some of it was great but i read enough, you kind of know right. With the skepticism, what is the biggest take away that you help potential entrepreneurs take away from your book. If you do something significant, you will not feel qualified to do so and i explain exactly why you feel that way and show you a path out and then ill show you the thing called innovation stack which you can build and if you build it you will end up transforming your industry, you dont even transform, you basically create a new industry that is different than the other industries. And youre almost beyond attack so we see this again, tesla is a great example in current day in a dozen examples in california. Probably hundreds of examples around the country but its a powerful thing and if you see the thing and recognize it, youll be a little bit less scared, i say a little bit so i dont want people to think the book is a guidebook or checklist, its not a howto guide. It is basically the confession of somebody who has been there, coupled with supporting historic of evidence and then all tied together around this idea that innovation, true innovation, stuff that hasnt been done before just differently and we dont discuss it. What is unlike, lets talk about that. Hopefully if you read it and you find yourself in a situation where you can sell the perfect problem, you wont disqualify yourself early. Like the guy, this guy is a multimillionaire, super successful, he is a painting worth more than my house. He told me that he shot one of his companies down when he was six steps into an innovation stack, if id read your book i might never quit sorely. I sat there for second and thought what would the world be like. He was trained to solve a big problem and he couldnt, hes like i do it. But thats because i kept getting all the negative feedback, all the stuff that i talked about in the book and equip. This is a guy who is successful, complete bad ass. I use his name if i could but i cant use his name because they didnt get his permission but dont does call for yourself, or at least know when to disqualify or have a sense of what it looks like. Because it will different. Obviously the book just hit shelves but have you shared this idea of an innovation stack and seen it play out successfully with any other entrepreneurs . Im not trained over the idea, i can piece together all my interviews, you dont have to buy the book, you can piece it together, its an easy way to disseminate knowledge. I share this all the time and i work with entrepreneurs and talk to them and encourage them and i discourage it to see if they can handle it. But i think the best advice i can give is that new solutions are really messy ugly things and that weve been trained to want validation in advance and thats going to kill you and stop you every time and just get over that. And then i hope that people will care about something enough to actually stick their neck out because what i found again elise the great entrepreneurs i studied, none are doing it for the money, maybe a little bit but none are doing for the fame or whatever the public facing benefits are, not that those are necessarily benefits but theyre doing it because they cared deeply about scolding a problem. You care enough about a problem it will give you tremendous motivation. Im giving it away another chapter. You dont even have to buy the book. But the point is, you get that motivation to solve a problem that you really care about and that motivation, if you care deeply about the problem will drive you anyway that money, fame or any other motivator cant. A lot of times you will need that because its a loan you have. Especially when even your family members, i come home to this day and tell my wife some of the things im working on and she rolls her eyes, thats not going to work. So you have to have something to stand on. You talk about how theres so many copycats especially in Silicon Valley and a distinct widistinction between the copycs and innovators. Whats a company that you seen recently that you think is a real disruptor and that youre excited about. I love let me step back and talk about cats, copycats. Ive got no judgment against copying, love copying, i think its exactly the way to do anything, every thing in this room everything here is a copy, some of it is actually fake, those are not real tvs. But its a copy and thats right because people have built tv studios and figured out that they need to air condition the place that we dont sweat. This tv that were in right now is a copy of other tv studios, the desk in the chair, although this is copied and that is good because they all work, their serving as a perfectly good chair. I love copying, i will always copy if theres an existing solution. But i dont believe it should stop copying. I dont believe that we should only copy. I believe that if you limit yourself to only the world of known solutions, you will deprive all of us of this new thing that you could potentially invent. So companies that are doing great, i love tesla, i frankly love spacex, ive only met you a couple times but the guy who sits there and goes im going to land a rocket like that in my rockets going to land straight up and down, im not going to take it and fish out of the ocean, going to stick the landing. The first five times or seven times, i dont know how many times, you just all the videos it falls over and blows out. But he sticks the landing. The tesla is not a traditional, it has a massive innovation stack, if you think its just a battery, and electric motor, you are dead wrong, theyre reentering how it goes together and the suspension works and how does the software work, how do you purchase car, there are hundreds of things that are different, and innovation stack and a tesla but gm will have a hard time copying. Ive tremendous respect for these companies especially because they usually get so much abuse at an early stage, if you want to see coming with an innovation, you should look with the ones that are most mocking. We only have a couple minutes left, we talked today about perfect problems and they want to ask whats the next perfect problem that youve identified. The one im working on is journalism. Specifically the problem that we as individuals have lost control of our own identities and we no longer have control over part of ourselves. Right now i exist as a bunch of servers and hightech companies and big platforms, i dont know whats in the files were being used for my good or against me, it is just bad for me as an individual, what is also bad as an individual ive lost my economic voice, what i mean by this is i cannot pay more for good content and less for crab. Heres the problem, most media these days is monetized using advertising. So theres some subscriptions at work for handful publications but most publications and videos are supported Washington Post youre one of the five, Washington Post, financial times, New York Times and the economist. If its not one of those five, actually, somebody at your institution tried to talk me into doing this. Back in 2016 of building a micro payment system. The reason he wanted to do this and the reason i been doing this is because all of us as Consumers Want to be able to pay more for their stuff for good and less for bad. Im about to go have lunch in d. C. And im going to spend my money at some restaurant and am probably going to eat a vegan because they eat a plantbased diet, if i buy a bunch of expressive vegetables and pay more for a plant burger than a real hamburger, thats a loan boat that gets auppercaseletter. If i pay 20 bucks for a burger that is 20 votes that i want. We calculate all those boats and thats what gives us quality and everything. But it does not work online. Because discrete thing about online consumption is if i trick you into watching something for ten seconds and make the same couple of pennies for the ten seconds you love. Your journalists thats what you do, you fact check and uphold organization mind you, they need to get paid and you know whos going to pay for that, consumers like me who consume yourself. I need to pay you more because you have a Big Organization that has decreased the quality and is not a judgment of whos right and whos wrong, its simply a way of saying humans need to be able to express their preferences otherwise will be left with crab. Think of it again in terms of food. If we passed a law in d. C. That every meal was ten bucks, would you like it . What happens, you say i have some good restaurants, fancy steak, no they just went out of business because they cannot put a fancy steak in front of you for 10. You will not start because what will happen is the Business Model replacing it will just make the cheapest crab we possibly can and sell for 10. And thats the world we live in an journalism and what i think is a crime is the fact that what we become is a combination of a little bit and the rest is what we put in our heads. In the model for what we eat pretty much works. The model that what we put in our heads, the material that you create as a journalist is now being economically incentivized by the system that rewards cheap and think god jeff is rich in amazon is a Great Company because amazon made jeff rich and jeff employed you and probably loses money in the deal. Thank you jeff for employing him. But the point is we should not have to live in that world and thats when looking at right n now. Fascinating thats up virtually all the time we have today but thank you so much for joining us to talk about the new book and its the innovation stack. Okay. Sunday night on q a a look at american president s through the lens of the books favorite with journalist and historian craig. The story has often been in use all in the quote that kennedys father was the one pulling the strings behind the scene, that is not true, jack kennedy won the posted price there is multiple times when he brought up the pulitzer prize. He said i would rather win a port surprised to be president because he had a strong desire for fame even though he did not really want to do literary work, he got himself the price in new york city, washington, d. C. , people are gossiping, dignity really wrote the book, i wonder how much money theyre getting out of the royalty checks. But the poets change the equation and made a moral question and ethical question. Leaders realize this to when i was at the kennedy president ial library and looked at the letters he was receiving in 1957 and librarians were sending him letters, schoolteachers were sending them letters saying did you really read this book and they were responding to the interview
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