Entrepreneurship
Being an entrepreneur for almost all my business life and coming from an entrepreneur’s family, it was no big surprise that one day I will support other entrepreneurs to become successful as well. After my wife and I decided to no longer run businesses ourselves, we decided to help young entrepreneurs build their companies, like we have been helped by mentors and investors to build ours.
Living for the longest part of our business life in Silicon Valley, we started the Society3 Accelerator in San Francisco in 2014 and ran eight badges. Since the beginning, we have been blessed with a 50% success rate, measured by external follow on funding of our portfolio companies. We were excited to have found a way to cut the average failure rate of 90% almost in half. During these years we founded the World Innovations Forum and expanded our reach into Europe, mainly Switzerland and Germany, Asia, mainly Vietnam, Nepal, and South Korea, and also into Africa, mainly Rwanda, Ghana, and Kenya. Then came Corona in 2020 and we couldn’t travel. During that time of musing we discovered through neuroscience, how our brain composes thoughts. And we applied that thinking to ideas – in particular disruptive ideas. That was the time where we did, what I thought we never do again, started a new company in late 2020 and build a solution in 2022/23/. And revitalized my hashtag: “impossible”
“Impossible is my hashtag”
Innovation
Innovation has captivated my interest since I was a boy. It never stopped driving me to innovate.
At age four, my father gave me a concertina. Being extremely curious, I cut it open to see what’s inside. It was disappointing to see nothing but an empty space. The only interesting thing was the metal pieces, but nothing that looked like creating music. When my mother found out she was about to be very angry, I was told later. But my father stopped her as he was very impressed with me trying to “sneak” into this device to find out how it works. The learning: It’s OK to be curious and trying to find out everything. Fast forward: My very first blog post was about innovation.
Eventually, I decided to find out what innovation really is, how it is made, where it comes from, and when innovation is really innovation. My first book about innovation, “Innovations Paradigm,” was more or less a collection of all thoughts, findings, relations, experiences, and effects from innovation I could find. On one side, it touches briefly on the 12,000 years of innovation history, and on the other side takes the latest understanding from neuroscientists how ideas get formed and composed in our brain.
“Impossible is my hashtag”
Artificial Intelligence
The future is the only time-span we can influence. For the past 12,000 years, once we understood to farm and harvest, built buildings, organized ourselves in larger groups, and during the industrial revolution we leveraged this ability to influece our surrounding for our benefit. With an ever-deeper understanding of our mind, our neural network, our DNA, and more we are on the verge of an intellectual revolution.
Overcoming all limitations. When we experience our own brain we mainly think of its deficiencies and limits. Nevertheless, so far the brain was good enough to build things no other species could build and it was a key driver to overcome countless deficiencies as a biological being that theoretically should have been extinct millennia ago. But we built a tool for any mechanical and muscle power-related deficiency. But now humanity makes its biggest leap since the beginning of our species as homo sapiens. We created the basis for Artificial Intelligence. And this invention is by order of magnitude more influential and relevant for nature than anything we even dreamed about.
This evolution is nature’s best bet to let biological life survive beyond the lifespan of the planet it descends from. The research for alternative inhabitable planets has already begun. Earth is our nest – one day we will literally learn to fly and explore the universe for all reasons we already know today. Think big, think bold, and outside the nest (box). “Impossible is my hashtag”
