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

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business & Innovation Q&A for Young Entrepreneurs & Others (June 9, 2021) »

1 hour 29 minutes

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How do you maintain a work-life balance? How do you decide what is more important, the meeting or the gym training? Could you list all of the apps and big app projects you ever made, with brief descriptions? How do you decide your employees' compensation? Why were you a physics prodigy? Did you just fall in love with the subject? Did someone encourage you? How can venture capitalists identify the most talented young entrepreneurs? What do you recommend for obtaining funding for your new business? How do you gain internal confidence and believe that what you do is right? Does Wolfram handle its own cybersecurity or use third-party MSPs? I have many questions. Do you automate testing? Do you group clients? How? Do you test UX? How? How would you connect CRM to the model of everything? What is better, Kanban or Scrum? How do you work with executives when your job relies on long-term thinking and investing (e.g. cybersecurity)? How did you overcome the hurdles of being a solo founder? Another cybersecurity question: how do you address the risk of supply chain attacks since your language is used by other companies? This is probably an underdetermined question, but a friend of mine is starting a company in the healthcare software space and he wants me to leave my PhD program and help him cofound the company. What are the criteria that you would use to judge (the company idea, the grad school and others) to evaluate this decision? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business & Innovation Q&A for Young Entrepreneurs & Others (May 12, 2021) »

1 hour 13 minutes

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How do you track if people are working or not if they are not in the office? I personally do not really like the idea of NFTs as just purely art. Do you know of any special use cases for NFTs that you think are not considered enough, or have you thought of any special use cases of NFTs that others have not really considered? Do you own any shares? What companies would you consider worth buying a share of? What do you think would happen in society if we discovered the genetic Fountain of Youth? Would you reverse your age if it were possible? How much of your software do you understand? At what level of technology do you think we humans are at: The peak? Not even close to the peak? Close to the peak? Have you ever designed and/or sold hardware? What skill sets are the same/different for developing hardware vs. software? Have you created a business applying cellular automata? Do you know someone who did it? Are today's nerds and their enterprises missing out on anything by leaving traditional managerial CEOs out, or do nerds simply produce better products/processes? Have you seen the Google Primer app? It's essentially business development info as flashcards in course form. How has your engagement with your company as CEO changed since the initial founding? Did you find it difficult to stop overseeing certain things as the company grew in size, for instance, and as the nature of your role changed? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business & Innovation Q&A for Young Entrepreneurs & Others (Apr. 28, 2021) »

1 hour 33 minutes

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How do you incentivize teams working on subcomponents of larger systems that don't directly impact P&L? Are you optimistic about the economic future in the medium and long term? Do you think computers will ever be able to become more efficient allocators than free markets? How would you go about mapping the EdTech industry? I know people building products, doing private equity deals and doing consulting, as well as teachers using products. Nobody knows what's out there! Do you think a UBI-based economy is coming soon? What are your thoughts on UBI? How would the bot even evaluate the value of the labor? Seems super complicated. Why was Bell Labs so successful? Do you think it can be copied? I've always wanted to know how to start an R&D lab with only ideas. For example, XPRIZE has a carbon capture prize. Looking at a whale's baleen, how feasible is it to have "baleen" filters on container ships that filter carbon from the oceans as the ship moves? When the ship docks, filters can be swapped out and the carbon can be collected and turned into building materials or "goop" for 3D printers. Just a quick thought. Based on your experience leading a largely remote organization, how do you track and reward the value that team members contribute? You should have smashed 80% of the awards to increase the value of the other 20%. How has your company evolved relative to your expectations when you started it? And how successful is it in achieving your goals, say out of 10? Any thoughts on team building/a group becoming a team? Have you had any failures after your PhD? If we compare the UK to the US, why does the latter seem much better than the former in terms of developing business ideas from academia to industry? Maybe it's time to reflect and present useful things to people that they're not using after years and years, and maybe not let them wait another 20 years. Your record keeping seems incredibly robust. Has that always been the case? What inspired its structure? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business & Innovation Q&A for Young Entrepreneurs & Others (Mar. 31, 2021) »

1 hour 24 minutes

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Tell us about your failures as an entrepreneur and what you learnt from them? What is your opinion about software patents? How many hours did you work in academia compared when you went to industry? How can young people, like my niece obsessed with Fusion Rockets, follow their dreams? How much should one be projected in the future, rather than staying focused on the present? Why was Steve Jobs so successful? Was he a good engineer or a good seller? Or a good designer? What is more important: focus or a good idea? How quickly did you get help with Biz Admin, accounting and such? How much of the operations of the biz are you able to automate with functions in WL, are there special functions for this unique purpose? What is your success/failure ratio for ideas/projects you've started, that haven't quite worked out? How much do you think that the title of your degree affects what projects you will be able to work on? Do you think the label traps you in one field or type of job? Hey Stephen, have you ever thought about talking on the Indie Hackers podcast? They showcase self-funded businesses. In what category am I? is 39 considered young, or am i in the "Others" category? Thousands of ideas I have, so thousands things to do, but how to prioritize? That I don't care about the money when doing something interesting and working on a project, is that a good idea? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business & Innovation Q&A for Young Entrepreneurs & Others (Mar. 17, 2021) »

1 hour 40 minutes

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How did Champaign become the base of operations of the company? Why haven't you lived in Champaign for "three decades"? Is it a doable thing to work at a university and run a startup at the same time? Hi Stephen, at pre-revenue stage, should a company aim for reaching revenue faster at the expense of cash or for saving cash in order to survive little longer at the expense of time/market opportunity? How do you deal with employees who may be very talented and productive, but may find it hard to fit in with the rest of the team? I wonder if it's even possible for large companies to be agile. How do you plan a roadmap for your company? Does it just happen naturally or is there some deep thought that goes into what you want to make happen? What's your experience with management paradigms like SCRUM and agile? Can you recommend a 'general strategy'? Would you please elaborate on the distributed nature of your company? Should there be a limit on the maximum number of people on a project or in a meeting? Is there a suitable time period which one must devote to reading about previous innovations/developments related to the theme of a project, before actually jumping onto the implementation? Is it possible or practical to avoid mid-managers while scaling up the company by creating sub-founders who work just like the founder at the founding stage of the company? What are the most tiresome things in your job as a CEO? How do you stay so intense and focused after all these years when you could've retired much much earlier? View Less »

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A:

Business & Innovation Q&A for Young Entrepreneurs & Others (Mar. 3, 2021) »

1 hour 28 minutes

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Can you give us some insights into how you scaled up Wolfram, and what important issues/questions you had to tackle or what significant lessons you learned? Are there cultural biases that you have had to overcome for breaking any prior limits in the possibilities of your activities? How did you find your first employees? Did you have to go to a lot of places to find them? Partner vs employee is a really interesting distinction to discuss - employees complete tasks, partners identify tasks worth investing in? How do you deal with individuals who are strongly convicted that they are knowledgeable on a matter but actually have no idea what they are talking about? Jim Cramer talked on Lex about political games Steve Jobs and his people played, a kind of high level thing. What does that really mean? In the beginning, how many of your decisions about the company were gut instinct/market research/customer feedback/something else? Is it possible to earn money doing free software? What is "Open Source" good for from your perspective? How do you assess people to figure out their niche? View Less »

Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

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