Stephen Wolfram Livestreams

Business, Innovation & Managing Life Q&A (92 videos)

Biweekly ask-me-anything about business, innovation & managing life

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 »
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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 »
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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 »
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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 »
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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 »
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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 »
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