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

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (September 29, 2021) »

1 hour 1 minute

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Do you believe billionaires should exist? Are you one? Why do billionaires make space rockets? Do you have a fancy car? Or a boat? At least three! Elon Musk, Richard Branson, Jeff Bezos? How do you determine if your time is being well-spent? How many computers do you own? Do you build them yourself? I have a 9–5 job and graduated in physics, but work as an analyst. I'm tired when coming home and want to learn more skills. Any advice? Do you perceive yourself as an altruist? Do you still systematically learn new science by textbooks? Why is it so hard for independent learners outside of institutions to get access to decent tools and classes? It is hard not to default to Python because of the lack of financing. How is the landscape of investing in technology startups changing? Where do you fit in? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (September 15, 2021) »

1 hour 42 minutes

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How do you start a mega corporation? How do you retain the best people over the years? I heard that CEOs actually have no impact in large companies. How do you have a successful software company in this day with only three good machine learning engineers left? I'm just saying I've heard Wolfram Research really needs to hire more machine learning experts. How do you do that when good machine learning people don't work for less than 150k? How many people could someone lead? After starting a business, how do you know when you should secure an attorney? It's such a large expense, but it seems like an unavoidable necessity. Any plans to take a trip into space? How much more should the CEO make than the median salary? I am 17 right now. Do you think the USA is better than the UK for business and innovation? Second question: Do you think it's a good idea to start building companies in your 20s, or is it a better idea to first build (theoretical) experience and go for it later on? As in, what do you think of people in their early 20s building machine learning/AI startups? Do you have any heuristics for deciding when to stop or dramatically alter a long-term and expensive research project? It is tempting to be very quantitative about measuring the output of your various projects and teams in Wolfram and trying to optimize. Could this also leave people feeling like robots? Have you ever made any of your employees sign employee contracts with non-compete agreements? Are there any focused research teams at Wolfram, like full-time researchers on AI/machine learning? Are there any plans to open offices in Germany? You were very successful at a young age. How can one be confident toward older or more experienced people? What quality should we look for in people to determine if working with them will improve us? Do you have ideas for intermediate-scale projects/companies (maybe 25 or fewer people) that you aren't working on because they aren't compatible with Wolfram's size? What is your favorite chocolate? What was your reaction to getting the MacArthur grant? Was it exciting? What did you do with the money? (Was there money attached to it back then?) View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (September 1, 2021) »

1 hour 33 minutes

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Did you ever experience imposter syndrome? As automation and worker reduction at the workplace continue to gather steam, would it make sense to legally reduce further the max hours worked per week to avoid mass unemployment? You ultimately named your company with your last name. Why? I have mixed feelings about this. What are your thoughts on science and efficiency? Do you believe that high-profile science experiments could be done more efficiently in order to achieve a particular discovery? Is there room for imagination and creativity in (unconventional methods) in the scientific field? How can people in school and in general have more self-confidence to stand up to the institutionalized networks with unfortunate entry conditions? How much of your work in your business is "exploration of opportunity" vs. "management"? Do you have a set ratio or rules of thumb to regulate between the two? One issue preventing traditional big industries from innovating R&D is said to be the difficulty to adopt new paradigm shifts. What is your view on this? Does Wolfram only makes a profit from sales of the software? Does it have other sources of income? Have you ever gotten takeover proposals from Google, Facebook, Microsoft or others? Will you exit one day? What other companies/groups out there are doing consistent, good, independent work using a similar model to Wolfram? Any standouts? Do Wolfram employees get motivated when they see the result of people using Wolfram technologies? Will you go beyond being an Oracle system for cryptocurrencies such as Cardano, Ada, etc.? Or will you eventually leverage your computable data to create your own cryptocurrency? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (August 18, 2021) »

1 hour 40 minutes

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How do you keep track of all the information you have reviewed, from articles to journals to emails to books? What are your thoughts on technology/startups in Latin America (present and future), especially starting a company where there is no specific tech community, or where the people might not be ready for adoption? How do you manage your family life around your busy schedule with personal and business interests? How can you deal with a school that demotivates your will to explore and learn new stuff? How much time do you spend on technology intelligence? How are you keeping eyes on topics you may be interested in? I started a business by accident, and now I'm trying to find out how to build a real business around that. How important is law for success and/or payoff? What are the doors it opens? Given that Bill Gates has a much higher net worth than Steve Jobs.... Who are the people under 30 who inspire you? How do you deal with the feeling that you need to understand everything that exists before you can do something original? What do you do when you suffer credibility due to a lack of paper credentials? Do you have an ideal "ratio" where you split your time between working IN the business as opposed to working ON the business? If not a ratio, do you have rules of thumb for when you work IN vs. ON? How many companies livestream meetings on a frequent and regular basis? Food for thought. Would there be value to developing a PhD equivalent for generalists instead of specialists? Yeah, it's crazy that Wolfram Research streams everything! It's the best! View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (August 4, 2021) »

2 hours

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Does Stephen have a dog? Does Josh have any startups that he thinks could be billion-dollar unicorns? If so, what are they doing or what industries are they in? Do you think that the innovation process is different based on its societal value? If so, how can a developing society navigate this process of innovation? What are some guiding principles in your lives? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business, Innovation and Managing Life (July 21, 2021) »

1 hour 29 minutes

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What good came out of the pandemic from a business or recruiting point of view? Can you talk more about what Sergey Brin did when he interned for you? His resume reads, "I developed a code analysis and extraction tool for the Mathematica source code." Is there a general rule for deciding when to outsource some aspects of my startup, especially if it's on a low budget? How do you organize your day's activities? Do you like to work from a daily to-do list, work toward weekly goals or just get in "the zone" and see what you can do during a day? Is it more important to be of value or to have a valuable network of connections? You sequenced your genome, but did you do a 23andMe (or Ancestry or other) test to find relatives? Do you fast or do any other modern longevity practices? I noticed this year has been the year with the least number of days of being sick.... Quarantine and masks? How many hours of straight work will you do on a single project in a week and on an average day? Given a set of interesting ideas that require big efforts to be developed, how do you prioritize which one to pursue? How did/would you balance ambitious technology projects with dating? I have a business question: What's the practical difference between "Wolfram Desktop" and "Mathematica"? If the difference is negligible, the business facet of the question is, how are you dealing with the branding confusion here? Is "Mathematica" the legacy name and "Wolfram" the name going forward? Bring "The List" out of hibernation! How does your family deal with your long working hours? Do they get enough of you? Do they feel you spend enough time with them? What do you do when you get discouraged? Go for a walk? Take a day off? Work harder? (And what causes you discouragement?) View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A (76 videos)