Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A: Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (March 16, 2022) »

1 hour 19 minutes

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If you could live anywhere in the world, where would it be? Any business/scientific reason why that place? University vs. experience in programming and computer science: which one is more valuable? How do you manage technical debt? What advantages come from using Wolfram Language as in-house code? How do you manage technical debt in Java codebases? Good afternoon, Dr. Wolfram. How do you cope with the stress of releasing new products? As it is very hard to judge the success beforehand, do you have any techniques to reduce that stress? If you were never allowed to use Wolfram Language, what would you use? Do you find that innovation is largely driven from within, or is it largely external (e.g. your users push you for more features)? How does Stephen see the current co-creation space and how can we bring the benefits to smaller businesses with smaller budgets? What is the best way to fund a research project? Would you always have to artificially describe some midterm future application of your research to sell a business plan to some investors? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (March 2, 2022) »

1 hour 34 minutes

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Does Stephen play any musical instruments? Would you consider songs formal systems? I've been imagining a multiway graph for all of the chords on a guitar. How do you think the behavior of innovation changes with scale? That is, what's the difference in innovation between startups, small businesses and enterprises? Do you have electronic-off days or time windows (no electronic communication and no computers, etc.)? How do you deal with back pain or eye strain from reading too much? If you started your business again, what would you avoid or do differently? As we are eliminating jobs at light speed, how do you think society will cope with mass unemployment after we can automate the majority of trade-related jobs? How did you manage the sales side when you started that first company? If you were to go back in time, would you be able to get the world to 2020 tech within 20 years? But what happens in the future when we have AIs that can simulate realities that are indistinguishable from reality? What if you can simulate people doing jobs? Does Stephen Wolfram think that people should specialize in education earlier? Instead of taking general classes in high school, focus on one field and get to an undergrad level of education earlier? Didn't Feynman study Mayan hieroglyphs? Can an old dog learn new tricks (i.e. can a middle-aged person learn math and programming and be successful anywhere near someone who started when they were young)? What innovations, if any, do you think may be most useful for K–12 public education in the US? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (February 16, 2022) »

1 hour 23 minutes

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What are your thoughts on GDPR legislation and the general hostility toward cloud technologies in the EU? Lots of tech companies are getting huge fines these days. Your hair is looking sharp today, looks like a fresh cut. What are your thoughts on the grooming habits of scientists and technologists? Any correlation with grooming/dress and productivity? Can you talk about the perception of CEOs within their own companies and in the public eye? How can one maintain one's leadership and reputation when thousands of people rely on one's decisions? Have you ever felt that you were working on too many projects at one time? I am developing three different products now. I love the challenge, but is one project at a time better in your experience? What is your ideal business size? How many employees? Is there a sweet spot? What's your rule of thumb to change your mind? Your record of being a WFH CEO is unique. Has the pandemic changed how you have been CEOing? If you don't mind me asking, Stephen, what do you do to relax and unwind from your business? What's the best way to organize thoughts, ideas, pieces of code, frameworks and projects when there are hundreds? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (February 2, 2022) »

1 hour 36 minutes

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Mr. Wolfram, do you like video games? If so, what games do you play? What do you plan to achieve by the end of 2022? Is there a way to gauge how good your own business/product ideas are when you have limited external feedback available? Stephen, with access to the internet, gaining knowledge is not a problem, but humans absorb it very slowly. How can we optimize the use of the knowledge to which we have access? How do you manage to keep up with a project after the most challenging parts are complete? Sounds silly, but for me, I lose interest after I crack its core. If you were starting a tech company today outside of the US, where would you start it? Why doesn't Stephen have an American accent after living in the US for so long? On innovations and, in fact, thinking in general: what analogies/mental models do you find most useful? Do you think a four-day workweek is a good idea? Feels like it's de facto becoming so post-pandemic. How should I approach my boss so he makes a decision that I believe is good for the company? Is it good to insist or is it better to do it softly? What has one to learn about business administration? What are useful learning resources? Have you ever regretted leaving academia? How far out do you prep your day-to-day work? I'm starting to get the hang of studying routines, but not the organization of what there is to do. View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (December 22, 2021) »

1 hour 26 minutes

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Can you use Wolfram Language to log on to a website with a username and password and read data from that website? Will computational chemistry/biochemistry programs (AlphaFold2?) be accurate enough in their predictions to completely dominate private R&D to reduce the costs and durations of expensive wet lab experimentation? When did you first decide to hire people at Wolfram Research? How did you recruit and evaluate them? What have you learned about hiring since then? Have you ever authentically read and replied to an unsolicited email if someone has an important idea for Mathematica and/or Wolfram Language? Do you have developers that work in a large variety of topics (changing monthly, perhaps), or are most in a "fixed" position/topic? When you reach the level you do with Wolfram Research, what steps do you undertake to ensure that you continue to innovate and don't lose ground to your competitors, and that you don't make the wrong business decisions? As someone with a technical background, how do you maintain a holistic overview of your company? For instance, do you better attempt to understand the company's financial books? What is your workout routine? How do you balance time being creative (for projects) with the everyday necessary work? At the start of crypto projects, there is always this battle between centralization and decentralization. You need an amount of centralization in the beginning to get things going. How long should a project be given before you let in the masses? Do you have an opinion concerning Poor Charlie's Almanack: The Wit and Wisdom of Charles T. Munger? Do you use rules similar to those in cellular automata when you manage your company or your company's projects? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (December 8, 2021) »

1 hour 39 minutes

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Has Wolfram Research, Inc. done any research on and/or deals connected with household/personal robots such as Amazon's Astro? A question about your personal data logging: Have you identified any low-hanging fruit that could be broadly useful for "managing life"? Have you done any machine learning on that data? When did you realize you could do science for a living? Did you ever expect you'd do something else? Are people the world over losing confidence in fiat money and governments in general? What do you do to keep up your energy—supplements, omega-3 oils, etc.? What is the difference between planning for the future and envisioning a future? I work from 9am to 9pm in programming/math. I feel it's fine, but people say I work too much and that I should give myself a break. Should I listen? When does your working day end? Do you listen to music while working? Do you advise young professionals to "play the game," as in follow rules, meet requirements, concede to superiors, be political, etc., in academia or commercial settings? Do you respect people who take this approach? What do you spend your personal money on? Do you ever treat yourself to something nice, like jewelry, a fine dinner, etc.? Did you ever have to live with noisy upstairs neighbors? How do you decide between accuracy, speed and readability of code? Which tradeoff do you take and why? What's your opinion on company acquisition? Has Wolfram Research ever acquired other companies? If so, how do you quickly integrate an acquired company? Here's a question. My dad retired very early and he's got no direction, no focus or job. So he's digging himself into a pit. What can I advise him to learn/do that would be worth doing? In building an app that takes human language as input, do you feel that the current state of the art in parsers and compilers (based on Chomsky/trees/AST from >30 years ago) is in need of a rethink? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A (78 videos)