everywhere we look, the world is changing with technology, with political systems, even the way we interact with each other. How do you not only survive but thrive in a world of change? What's the secret sauce of Silicon Valley? We're here at the epicenter. People are trying to figure that out. So, I believe the secret is to think like an entrepreneur. I had the great privilege to interview some of the most successful entrepreneurs, people like Elon Musk building SpaceX and Tesla, the founders of Spanx, LinkedIn, 23andme, companies like Airbnb. I'm constantly asked, everyone comes up and says, Who's your favorite entrepreneur? And the answer might surprise you. My favorite entrepreneurs are Nadine and Red. This is my almost 101-year-old grandmother and her 102-year-old boyfriend, Red. Okay, so why, why, you know, why are they my favorite entrepreneurs? Because they're curious, they're constantly learning, they're constantly questioning, they're overcoming setbacks, and they really believe tomorrow will be better than today. Yes, my grandmother has

some aches and pains. I mean, she's a hundred. She's breaking triple digits. Yes, she's retired so she had a career as a nurse. And yes, she's left the home where she raised her four children. And yes, she lost her partner, her husband, after 62 years. But she's not complaining and she's not complacent. You know, she's challenging the status quo and looking for something better. She's a shining example of thinking like an entrepreneur. You know, she could have thought she was too old to venture out. She could have stayed in a retirement center, watch TV, stayed with the people around there, had meals delivered to her room. But instead, she ventured out. She loves music and she went to a local concert every single Saturday. She went to support local musicians and that's where she found read. So she got out of her comfort zone. You know, here's where the comfort zone is and here's where the magic happens and they are not the same place. So of all the entrepreneurs that I interviewed, 200 of them, in fact, what I started

learning was they got comfortable being uncomfortable. They didn't stay in their comfort zone. They pushed forward. That pit in your stomach, they thought, Okay, this means I'm building something important. I'm gonna put something into the world that people really need. Now, it's not an innate ability to think like an entrepreneur. People are not just born thinking like entrepreneurs. They work at it. And I'd like to share three of the skills that come out of my research. And the important thing here is they apply to each and every one of us. We can all think like an entrepreneur. The first is fly the OODA loop. So, this stands for observe, orient, decide, act. It's originally a fighter pilot mantra. And I have a very good friend who's a fighter pilot, Wes Hallman. He told me, If you want to think like an entrepreneur, you think like a fighter pilot. And here's why. If you can get inside the loop, the decision circle, you can observe, orient, decide, and act faster than a competitor, you can win in a dogfight, right?

competitor is reacting to a landscape that's already changed. You took a decision, you took an action, there a split-second behind. That's the same in a really entrepreneurial world and we live in an entrepreneurial world. An example is a fabulous one, is PayPal. So Max Levchin, Peter Thiel, and Elon Musk come together and they start PayPal. We all know what that is today, but they go through six different business models, right? Six different things they try in a year and a half, in eighteen months. They're moving through as quick as they can, observing, orienting, deciding, and acting. They raise money on a technology where they could beam cash between Palm Pilots. I don't know how many people remember the Palm Pilot, that's gone. PayPal is still around, right? One of the things they observed was that people on eBay were trying to transact and they were using this demo website, you know, to support the beaming product. At any rate, PayPal moved to create an online currency. Then eBay bought a competitor, they had so many more resources, people.

money. Still, the PayPal team moved faster. At one point, Visa, a credit card company, tried to sue the PayPal startup, saying, Now you're in our credit card business. And what they did was convince Visa to just study the problem for 12 months. Okay, never study the problem because while Visa is studying the problem, the PayPal team's observing, orienting, deciding, acting, and winning in the marketplace. So they sell to eBay. Now, the much more interesting thing is what happens next. The original twelve to eighteen people at PayPal, they go on to seed the entire next wave of the internet. They are the founders of YouTube, LinkedIn, Yelp, Slide, Digg, Tesla Motors. They certainly start SpaceX, the Founders Fund, 500 Startups. They're the first money invested behind Mark Zuckerberg at Facebook. They literally seed the entire next wave. When you spend time with them, I've spent time with all of these founders, you say, How is that possible? You didn't just do it once, but you did it. You fanned out and did it over and over.

again and what they'll say is the first thing you think. Yeah, that's not it. You have to observe, orient, decide, act. You have to keep moving. So Jeremy Stoppelman at Yelp, he said you have to look for a counterintuitive blip of data, something that doesn't make sense, and follow it. So Yelp was started as an email referral system, and they did not think anyone would want to write a review. Jeremy did not think that would be fun, and then what he found out is everyone wants to review the nail salon, the restaurant, the dry cleaner, and so they quickly moved and said, Okay, Yelp will be a review site. YouTube was started for video dating. This was a video dating startup until they shot video at a local zoo. They were just practicing uploading and shooting video, and everyone started watching the video of an elephant. Okay, if you're doing a video dating site, that doesn't make sense, but if you really quickly move to observe that, take decisions, take actions, we know what YouTube is today. It's the website where you can see all things.

video all the cat videos you want to see in the world right there there. So, these are successful entrepreneurs, but they have absolutely moved through different decision cycles. It's about thinking like an entrepreneur, and every single one of us can do that. This is an important point. So, if you are going to be flying an Oda loop, you have to have a fierce team with you. You need a wingman, you need a wingwoman. So, there's great research out of Northwestern, and says if you want to solve a problem alone, you can do that. A lot of people try to solve problems alone, and your success rate is about 44%. If you get other like-minded people, and many of us try to gravitate right towards our friends, then you can solve a problem a little bit better, at about 54% of the time. If you bring in an outsider, someone who thinks totally differently, your solve rate goes up significantly, and you solve approximately 75%. Now, here's the counterintuitive take away from this, here's the surprise. It's not because of

the person who's diverse who comes from the outside. It's because each single person raises their game when we think we're going to be challenged by someone who disagrees with us, who gets out of the comfort zone, who challenges the status quo. We do our homework, we show up prepared. We're more focused on the problem, we're more willing to articulate a point of view. So having an outsider come in actually raises our own performance. It's something really important to think about. It's uncomfortable, but it makes us stand a little taller and do a little bit better. All right, not just flying the Ute aloof but failing wisely is important. So if you think like an entrepreneur, it doesn't mean that you're never going to fail. In fact, the entrepreneurs that I interviewed in this research project, they are failing all the time, but they're failing wisely. So what does that mean? It means they're setting a ratio right. One in five things I try won't work. That's what I'm going for, or one in ten things and different.

people will set different failure ratios. The idea is that you don't want a zero ratio. A zero ratio means a perfect record, and that means you haven't tried something new. You haven't actually pushed into the innovation curve. So this is Jessica Heron. She's found her Stellan dot. Previously, the founder of wedding channel comm, and what she says is one in three. That's four ratio. One in three things she tries won't work, and that's what she's going for at Stella and I'd. She's got a workforce of stylist. It's a woman's direct selling company, and she just tells the stylist, you know, give me the feedback as fast as possible. Love it or lose it. Love this product, lose it out of our inventory, and they will lose one third, and that's success for Jess. At Google, Eric Schmidt instituted a 70-20-10 ratio, right? 70 percent of your time on core business, 20 percent of your time on side business-related, 10 percent on total moonshots. That 10 percent is most likely

failure, but it also may produce just spectacularly wonderful results. Now we've talked a little bit about incremental failure, but what if you absolutely run into a catastrophic failure? What if you're the captain of the Titanic? You hit an iceberg, that is a really big problem. The Titanic had 2,200 people on board, they had 16 lifeboats. Okay, what are you gonna do? We all know what happened in this story, right? In two hours and 40 minutes, the Titanic sank. Only 705 people survived, less than a third of the people survived. But what if you could think like an entrepreneur? What if you could be resourceful even in that terribly desperate moment? What if you could think to yourself, Hmm, what do I have on this boat that will keep people alive? There were tables, wooden tables, lots of them. Those would stay afloat. You could use deck chairs as paddles. You could use the car tires, there were cars and trucks aboard, as floating inner tubes. What if you could even use the iceberg as an island? The

iceberg was known to be about 400 feet long, and it was not going to sink. What if you could use your lifeboats as ferry boats and ferry passengers over to stand on the ice island? There would have been ways to save lives if you could think in a different way. You know, I used this example a couple of weeks ago. I was teaching at Stanford. We were teaching executive education to Hispanic entrepreneurs, and this is a case the Harvard Business Review has recently put forward. We were talking about how can you be resourceful, how can you fail wisely, and one of the Hispanic entrepreneurs came up to me so excited at the end of the day and said, I run a company out of Chicago. I ran a legacy construction business, and we are struggling, and now I think I could fail wisely. I could repurpose some parts of my company. I could repurpose some of the resources that I own. I can also go back to Chicago and I can think like an entrepreneur. That is really exciting, and that's what

gets me you know so thrilled with this dataset and with the skills every single person can hopefully take them and improve the kind of work that they're doing. Now it's not only flying a noodle loop and failing wisely, but another skill that I really think is important is what I'm calling gift small goods. So what's a small good, right? It's a small kindness, it's something of value that you can do for someone else, it's a five-minute favor, right? So what does that look like? You could write a few lines of code, you could critique a proposal, you could forward a resume, you could make an introduction - little things that we can do create huge opportunities for other people. Now why is it important to do well? It's always been sort of morally right to help out your colleagues, but we've had a saying, nice guys finish last. Okay, here's the really interesting thing about technology now - nice guys finish first, and the reason is your reputation will be known, it will be transparent. If you are gifting small goods, you will be

helping those around you, and other people will hear about it. Information will come to you. People will want to work with you. Talent will come your way. Deal flow will come your way. That actually makes you a lot more productive. The opposite is also true. If you are hoarding resources, if you're cheating people, if you're harassing people, we will know about that. And this is changing just in the last few years. The speed of communication and the transparency of our reputation means that we will know. So it's in your self-interest to be gifting small goods and generously helping and assisting those around you. Now the person that I know who does this best, especially in all of the 200 interviews I did, is a man named Bob Langer. And when people ask me who would you like to be most like in all of those interviews that you did, I say I would like to be like Bob Langer. And here's the reason why. He has a reputation for integrity, and he creates tremendous opportunity for everyone around him. Now I'm never gonna be a

chemical engineer. He's a scientist. He runs the world's largest biotechnology engineering lab. It's at MIT. He has co-founded 40 companies that have scaled up. He has 350 different licenses with pharmaceutical companies. You know, close to a hundred thousand, three hundred papers that are published. He is putting into the world some of the greatest technologies to stop human suffering. That's what Bob's trying to do. And as he does it, he brings along so many other people. When you ask him what he's most proud of, he says, My students, you know, they're kind of like my kids. I'm so proud as they succeed in the world. Now Bob has succeeded himself. We don't necessarily know his name, but all of the things that he's done, we do know about. He's the pioneer of human tissue engineering. He's the pioneer of many of the cancer delivery drugs, most all of them, in fact. He's even making synthetic vocal cords so that Julie Andrews of The Sound of Music might sing again. There are so many wonderful things that he's

bringing into the world. He says that it's important to some gift small goods and support other people because in his own career, he had a rocky start. He had a PhD from MIT in Chemical Engineering, but he wanted to teach high school. He sent out 40 letters and he got 40 rejections. Then he thought, okay, maybe I could be an engineer in the medical space. He started sending resumes and calling. Absolutely no one responded until one person did. A man named Judah Folkman, who was at Boston Children's Hospital. Folkman gave Bob Langer a first opportunity and supported him. Folkman was a cancer surgeon, and that's where most of Bob Langer's work has been applied. So Bob Langer has said, you know, so many opportunities were created by this one person. From him, it set him on his whole path to doing what he's doing. So the question for all of us is, who are we helping? You know, who, who are we bringing along? Who are we pushing forward in the

world. If we want to create things the world hasn't seen, it's difficult to do. And I believe life is a search for allies. We have to go out and help each other. That brings me back to all of the people who've helped me. There have been many along this path, starting with my grandmother. You know, I really do think she's an embodiment of what Eleanor Roosevelt said, which is, The future belongs to those who believe in the beauty of their dreams. Nadine has definitely lived that for many years. Now, I believe that the future belongs to those not only who believe in the beauty of their dreams, but those who will take action and those who will make their dreams a reality. So, may you go into the world and think like an entrepreneur, and may you use that ability to benefit the world. Thank you. [Applause]

The Secret of How to Think Like an Entrepreneur | Amy Wilkinson | TEDxPaloAltoSalon

TEDx is an international community that organizes TED-style events anywhere and everywhere -- celebrating locally-driven ideas and elevating them to a global stage. TEDx events are produced independently of TED conferences, each event curates speakers on their own, but based on TED's format and rules.

For more information on using TED for commercial purposes (e.g. employee learning, in a film or online course), please submit a Media Request here: https://media-requests.ted.com.

The Secret of How to Think Like an Entrepreneur | Amy Wilkinson | TEDxPaloAltoSalon

Scripts