Bold (11 page)

Take your typical day. After you get out of bed in the morning, what's the first thing you do? Brush your teeth. Right now your toothpaste is mostly chalk and flavoring, but with synthetic biology, it can be specifically designed to fight your breed of bad breath microbes. “That's not all,” continues Hessel. “It can have tooth-polishing nanoparticles designed to continue cleaning long after you've stopped brushing. It can be designed to detect infection or cancer or diabetes, turning different colors in the presence of each, or to release custom-designed probiotics that balance your microbiome. It can do all of these things. And that's just the first thing you do in the morning.”

To many, synthetic biology still sounds like science fiction, but what is transforming it into science fact is the same force driving all the other exponential technologies—Moore's law. Because DNA is nothing more than a four-letter code, when genetics went digital, it was transformed into an information science and thus hopped on the exponential expressway. This is why, in 1995, the National Institute of Health estimated it would take fifty years and $15 billion to sequence the first human genome. But in 2001, Dr. J. Craig Venter completed the task in nine months for $100 million. Today, thanks to exponential growth, you can sequence billions of letters of your genome in a few hours for about $1,000.
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But here's the kicker: Biotechnology isn't just accelerating at the speed of Moore's law, it's accelerating at five times the speed of Moore's law—doubling in power and halving in price every four months!

What all this means is that bioengineering, once an incredibly exclusive field limited to those with PhDs in large government and university labs, is starting to become an entrepreneurial playground. Already, biohacker spaces (where anyone can go and learn to play with synthetic biology) exist in most major cities and all the necessary equipment is available online (at cut-rate costs). For those not inclined
toward the science, dozens of contract research and manufacturing services (CRAMS) are willing to do the heavy lifting for a fee. Perhaps the biggest news is that synthetic biology is on the verge of developing the ultimate enabling technology and leveler of the playing field—a set of user-friendly interfaces.

One such tool is under development at Autodesk's Pier 9 design center, where Carlos Olguin
⁶⁰
is working on Project Cyborg, a synthetic biology interface that allows high school students, entrepreneurs, and citizen scientists to program DNA. “We're working hard to deskill the technology,” says Olguin. “A modeling process that would previously have taken weeks or months to complete and [would] require post-PhD level abilities can now be completed in a few seconds with relative ease. The goal here is to make programming with biological parts as intuitive as Facebook. We want more people designing and contributing, people who don't have a PhD, people like Jack Andraka—the fourteen-year-old high school student who won the grand prize of the Intel Science and Engineering Fair for creating a fast, accurate, pennies-on-the-dollar test for pancreatic cancer.”

And because this software lives in the cloud, not only can anyone use it to run experiments, anyone can sell the results on Autodesk's soon-to-be-established Project Cyborg marketplace, meaning synthetic biology is about to get access to that fantastic accelerator of entrepreneurial possibility: its first app store.

While the bulk of this chapter has been concerned with the exploitation of individual technologies for their entrepreneurial possibilities, even more potential can be found at the intersection of multiple fields. In fact, along just these lines, in March of 2013, I joined forces with genetics wizard Dr. J. Craig Venter and stem-cell pioneer Dr. Robert Hariri to found perhaps my boldest venture ever: Human Longevity, Inc. (HLI).
⁶¹
Venter, who serves as CEO, described
HLI's mission as “using the combined power of genomics, infinite computing, machine learning, and stem cell therapies to tackle one of the greatest medical, scientific, and societal challenges—aging and aging-related diseases.” Hariri, who pioneered the use of placental-derived stem cells, goes on to say: “Our goal is to help all of us live a longer and healthier life. By reenergizing our stem cells, the regenerative engine of our bodies, we can maintain our mobility, cognition, and aesthetics long into our later years.” Put simpler, HLI's goal is to make one hundred years old the new sixty.

We launched HLI with $85 million in seed capital, raised at record speed. Part of the reason for this velocity is that the company sits at the intersection of many of the exponential technologies discussed in this chapter: robotics, which enables lightning-fast sequencing; AI and machine learning, which can make sense of petabytes of raw genomic data; cloud computing and networks for transmitting, handling, and storing that data; and synthetic biology for correcting and rewriting the corrupted genome of our aging stem cells. Couple that with the incredible value proposition of abundant, longer, and healthier lives—there is over $50 trillion locked up in the bank accounts of people over the age of sixty-five—and you understand the potential.

And understanding this potential is critical if you're going to succeed as an exponential entrepreneur. Consider that, twenty years ago, the idea that a computer algorithm could help companies with funny names (Uber, Airbnb, Quirky) dematerialize twentieth-century businesses would have seemed delusional. Fifteen years ago, if you wanted access to a supercomputer, you still had to buy one (not rent one by the minute on the cloud). Ten years ago, genetic engineering was big government, and big business and 3-D printing meant expensive plastic prototypes. Seven years ago, the only robot most entrepreneurs had access to was a Roomba, and AI meant a talking ATM machine, not a freeway-driving autonomous car. Two years ago, the idea of living past a hundred was a crazy idea. You get the picture.

And it's a radical picture. Today's exponential entrepreneurs have at their disposal more than enough power, as Steve Jobs famously said, to
put a dent in the universe.
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Billion-dollar companies are being built faster than ever, and trillion-dollar industries are on their way. But before you consider taking your swing at the exponential piñata, the first and most important step is to convince yourself that you can take this step—which is why our next three chapters focus on the most critical tools in the kit of an exponential entrepreneur: the psychological techniques needed to go bold.

It started sometime in the 1930s. Our location is deep backwoods, Dogpatch, Kentucky, where tragedy is unfolding. Dozens and dozens of locals are being killed on a yearly basis, felled by the toxic fumes of skonk oil, a compound brewed at the so-called Skonk Works by grinding dead skunks and worn shoes inside a blazing still. Or at least, that's how Al Capp tells the story.
¹

Al Capp was the creator of the legendary comic strip
Li'l Abner
, and the Skonk Works were among his most memorable inventions—though Capp had little to do with the term's considerable staying power. Instead, we can thank the aerospace giant Lockheed for that.

In 1943, Lockheed's chief engineer, Clarence “Kelly” Johnson, fielded a call from the US Department of Defense. German jet fighters had just appeared over Europe, and America needed a counterpunch. The mission was unbelievably critical, the deadline impossibly tight. Kelly, though, had an idea. At their Burbank, California, facility, he recruited a small posse of his brightest engineers and mechanics, gave them total design freedom—no idea too weird or too wild—and then walled them off from the rest of Lockheed's bureaucracy. No one without
proper clearance was even told the purpose of this new project. No one with proper clearance ever breathed a word of their mission. Though, as these employees were housed in a rented circus tent (space was at a premium) intentionally located next to an exceptionally stinky plastics factory (to keep nosy people away), breathing itself was a little hard. That was why engineer Irv Culver borrowed Al Capp's terminology and started calling the place the Skonk Works.

One day, the story goes, the Department of the Navy was trying to reach Lockheed for an update on their new jet (technically the P-80) and got transferred to Culver's line by mistake. In his then-standard fashion, he answered the phone: “Skonk Works, inside man, Culver.”
²

The name stuck. A few years later, at the request of the comic strip copyright holders, the spelling was changed to Skunk Works.

And the Skunk Works worked. The US's first military jet was delivered to the Pentagon just 143 days later, a staggeringly short time frame that was, more incredibly, seven days ahead of schedule. In a typical military project, contractors can't even get their paperwork signed in that window, forget about building anything. Yet over the coming decades Lockheed's Skunk Works would repeat this success, going on to produce some of the world's most famous aircraft—the U-2, the SR-71, the Nighthawk, the Raptor—with this same methodology. These planes helped the United States win the cold war, of course, but their bigger impact was organizational: for the next half a century, whenever a company wanted to go bold, skunk was often the way innovation got done.

Everyone from Raytheon and DuPont to Walmart and Nordstrom has gotten in on the skunk game. In the early 1980s, to offer another example, Apple cofounder Steve Jobs leased a building behind the Good Earth restaurant in Silicon Valley, stocked it with twenty brilliant designers, and created his own skunk works to build the first Macintosh computer.
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The division was set apart from Apple's normal R&D department and led by Jobs himself. When people asked him why they needed this new facility, Jobs liked to say: “It is better to be a pirate than join the Navy.”

The question is why. When it comes to fostering bold innovation, why is it better to be a pirate? Why does the skunk methodology consistently foster such great results? And most importantly, what does this have to do with today's entrepreneur and a desire to tackle the bold?

Turns out, plenty.

Over the past few chapters, we've seen how exponentially accelerating technology provides today's entrepreneurs with an astounding reach, allowing small teams of innovators to tackle the kinds of grand challenges that were once the sole province of corporations or governments. This is huge news. At Singularity University, one of our core tenets is that the world's grandest challenges contain the world's biggest business opportunities. And because of exponential technology, for the first time in history, entrepreneurs can actually get in on this game. But there's a rub: Exponentials alone won't get this job done.

Climbing Mount Bold is not just technologically difficult, it's also incredibly psychologically difficult. Every innovator interviewed for this book emphasized the importance of the mental game, arguing that without the right mindset, entrepreneurs have absolutely no chance of success. I couldn't agree more. Attitude is the ball game. If you think you can or think you can't—well, you're right. Thus the goal of part two of this book is to provide you with an attitude upgrade—a series of battle-hardened, time-tested psychological strategies for going big and bold.

Toward this end, we'll take a three-pronged approach. In this chapter, we'll peek under the hood of skunk, getting at the core mechanisms that have turned this approach to innovation into one of the most successful in modern history. In the next, we'll explore the mental tools and techniques that I have personally relied upon in my life and work. Finally, to close part two, we'll meet a group of exceptional entrepreneurial billionaires—Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, Richard Branson,
and Larry Page—who are important not solely because of their financial success, but because that success has given them the ability to think at scale, the very skill needed to tackle grand challenges.

But first, the secrets of skunk.

Traditionally, when exploring these secrets, researchers start by parsing Kelly Johnson's fourteen rules for going skunk. This is a useful approach, and in the next section, we too shall venture down this path. But before that happens, it's helpful to address an idea baked into the DNA of this methodology yet often omitted from the discussion—the purpose of the project itself.

Companies do not go skunk for business as usual. These innovation accelerators are always about business as
un
usual. They are created to tackle the Herculean, purposefully built around what psychologists call “high, hard goals.” And it's the difficult nature of those goals that is actually the first secret to skunk success.

In the late 1960s, University of Toronto psychologist Gary Latham and University of Maryland psychologist Edwin Locke discovered that goal setting is one of the easiest ways to increase motivation and enhance performance.
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Back then this was something of a shocking finding. General thinking was that happy workers were productive workers and putting too much stress on employees—by, say, imposing goals—was considered bad for business. But in dozens and dozens of studies, Latham and Locke found that setting goals increased performance and productivity 11 to 25 percent.
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That's quite a boost. If an eight-hour day is our baseline, that's like getting two extra hours of work simply by building a mental frame (aka a goal) around the activity.

But not every goal is the same. “We found that if you want the largest increase in motivation and productivity,” says Latham, “then big goals lead to the best outcomes. Big goals significantly outperform small goals, medium-sized goals, and vague goals. It comes down to attention and persistence—which are two of the most important factors in determining performance. Big goals help focus attention, and they make us more persistent. The result is we're much more effective
when we work, and much more willing to get up and try again when we fail.”