Steve Hoffman: The Process of Radical Innovation

Steve Hoffman is a force of nature - and an amazing human. Known affectionately as “Captain Hoff” Steve is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and CEO of Founders Space, an one of the world’s leading incubators with over 50 partners in 22 countries. Steve’s book on innovation, “Make Elephants Fly: The Process of Radical Innovation,” is required reading for entrepreneurs worldwide. Listen in and learn what Steve has learned about getting companies ready for takeoff.

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Intro: [00:00:00] From Silicon Valley, the heart of startup land, it's Getting2Alpha, the show about creating innovative, compelling experiences that people love. And now here's your host, game designer, entrepreneur, and startup coach, Amy Jo Kim. 

Amy: Steve Hoffman is a force of nature and an amazing human known affectionately as Captain Hoff.

Steve is a serial entrepreneur, angel investor, and CEO of Founders Space, one of the world's leading incubators with over 50 partners in 22 countries. His knowledge about what it takes to innovate successfully runs deep. Listen to Steve tease out the difference between loving your product and loving your customers.

Steve: I always say love is blind. So you, you know, when you're infatuated, you tend not to see it for what it really is. Uh, and when people give you feedback, uh, saying, Oh, you know, [00:01:00] that person isn't right for you. If you're infatuated with them, you don't listen. So when you're in love with your product and you get feedback, you're like, no, no, no.

You know, you, you don't understand you. This is really good. You just don't get it. So filter automatically go up. Uh, that block them from taking a deeper look at their product and going deep with, uh, the people who are giving them the feedback because they really don't want to hear. So the advice I give startup founders, uh, to try to prevent this is don't fall in love with your product. 

Who you need to love are your customers. So you need to love them and they need to love your product. So, uh, your job is to love them enough to really listen to them. Like you do in a good relationship. And discover their psychology, what's in their head, what they're really thinking and get them to the point where they are [00:02:00] just crazy infatuated with your product.

Because if they're infatuated with your product, then you win. If you're infatuated with your product, you don't win. 

Amy: Steve is also the author of a fantastic book, Make Elephants Fly: The Process of Radical Innovation. First published in China. This book is now available worldwide and is required reading for entrepreneurs.

Listen in and learn what Steve knows about getting companies ready for takeoff.

Welcome Steve. 

Steve: Thank you. 

Amy: So happy you're here with us today. So please introduce yourself, what you do to the folks here. 

Steve: So what I do is I am the captain and co-founder of Founders Space. And we are an incubator and accelerator located, our headquarters are in San Francisco. But we work now in 22 countries around the world, helping startups innovate and [00:03:00] create products, raise money, go to market, everything.

Amy: Wow, and where are you right now? 

Steve: I am now in Beijing. So I am here in Beijing for a couple reasons. One, we have set up offices in China, in Shanghai, and we are expanding to Beijing and other cities. And the second reason is I just wrote a book called Making Elephants Fly: The Process of Radical Innovation, which takes all the teaching we have done for the past five years and all the learning and research. 

And puts that into a book about how startups, uh, can innovate and it really focuses on case studies of startups that have succeeded and why they succeeded and startups that have failed and why they failed. 

Amy: Wow. Sounds like a must read. So can you share one story from that book? Speaking of case studies, one story, there's so many great ones, uh, with us just to [00:04:00] give us a flavor for the kind of story and impact you're having.

Steve: Okay, well let me give you a story that most people might be familiar with. And it's a company. It was Flickr. So most of us have heard of the photo sharing site Flickr. It was the first social photo sharing site that went big. And the founder of Flickr, he was originally making a game. So he and his wife were focused on making a game, which they were very passionate about.

And they put a huge amount of energy and time into making that game. And what happened was that, uh, players didn't respond. The game was not successful. And whenever you have a product that isn't successful, I've done this myself many times. You think that adding more features will make it better. So they kept adding features to the game, you know, hoping to engage the players.

And nothing was [00:05:00] working, but one of the features they added was photo share. So I thought, well, we'll let, you know, the player share photos since currently they, you know, aren't totally into the game. And the photo sharing actually really seemed to work. And they figured, oh, there's something here. People really like actually sharing photos more than they like playing our game.

So they took the photo sharing feature out of the game. They named it Flickr and opened it up to everybody and boom, you know, it exploded. It became Flickr. Basically, everybody really loved the idea of, of social photo sharing. And that is a very important lesson in innovation. It's not what you start with.

It's what you learn along the way that makes the difference. And there's a second part to the story that I want to tell you. Because it's even more amazing. So Flickr got acquired by Yahoo. Then the founder, after, you know, a few years, decided he wanted to do another startup. So [00:06:00] he quit Yahoo. And guess what he did?

He started, uh, tried another game! Because he was passionate about making games. So he launched another game. It was a really cool idea where you convert people, kind of a pseudo religious kind of conversion mechanism. And it was so cool and interesting and different. That, you know, it didn't go anywhere.

So his second game was failing too. It wasn't gaining traction. He'd spent a lot of money. He had actually raised venture capital, uh, due to his success with Flickr, but money didn't help because users weren't into the game. And the game was kind of struggling along, and all of a sudden he realized this game isn't gonna go either.

You know, maybe my talent is not in game making, maybe it's in something else. So he and his team did a Hail Mary, and they started to go through everything that they had done before, and went all the way back to, you know, their first [00:07:00] game, and Flickr, and what they were doing, and they found one interesting thing.

And this time, the thing wasn't in their product, it was in their process. It was how they communicated as a team. So how they communicated as a team, they had modified ICQ, the original chat messenger, uh, to make it work with, uh, project management and team management. And they found this really effective.

So they go, what if we took this and we totally rebuilt it as a new product and opened it up to teams everywhere, enterprise customers, you know, who want to collaborate in business? And they launched that and they named it Slack. And we all know the history of Slack. It just exploded and became even bigger than Flickr, a huge unicorn, um, that, you know, companies all over the world are now using to communicate.

Okay. So, the moral of the story is, you know, it's not always what you start with. And if you're going to do a game that doesn't work, [00:08:00] look elsewhere. Anyhow, he had two huge successes in areas that he didn't expect. And I think that is kind of the heart and soul of innovation. 

Amy: That is such a great story. I love that story and, 

Steve: It inspires me. 

Amy: Yeah. And I tell that same, it's great because I actually tell that same story as an example of the core principles of game thinking. So we're, you know, this is why we enjoy each other so much. Part of it is not, and it's, it's really, really true. Part of it is also, part of that story is that they were developing for three years, essentially their core learning loop, the bit of value that you get every day, that thing that's, you know, Mario running and jumping and climbing in a game. 

So Flack didn't come out of nowhere. It came out of years of iteration on that basic process. 

Steve: Right. They were using it across multiple products and perfecting it and perfecting it.

Amy: Right. And across [00:09:00] multiple teams working in Vancouver and LA and San Francisco. Yeah. I'm so glad that you're spreading that message. That's a really, really good story. So along the way, let's dig in a little more to the lessons you've learned about innovation that you're now sharing on your tour of China.

So one of the things that I struggle with, every designer I know struggles with, many of my clients and students struggle with, is filtering the feedback coming at you. Yes, you need to innovate. Yes, you need to iterate. Yes, you need to figure out where you're going in partnership with your early customers.

Steve: Yeah. 

Amy: Then you start getting lots of different feedback from different people. Some of them are early customers. Some of them might be customers down the road. Some of them are your stakeholders. Some of them are your team. Some of them are your VC's girlfriend, et cetera, et cetera, all that feedback coming at you.

You know, you want to listen to feedback. How do you navigate who to listen to and who to tune [00:10:00] out at, at, at different stages of your development? 

Steve: Great question. It's funny. So we run programs at Founders Space, uh, where we, uh, work with startups on their startups and, you know, give them feedback on their products, give them feedback on their business model, give them feedback on their team and their go to market strategy, everything, all elements of their business.

And when they join Founders Space, the first thing I tell them is you're going to get way too much feedback, because you're not going to get just feedback from me and my partners, you're going to get feedback from all of our mentors, you're going to get feedback from our instructors, you're going to get feedback from the other startups, and you're going to have so much feedback, you're going to come back to me, and you're going to say, Steve, person A told me to do this, and person B told me to do the opposite, and person C told me to do something entirely different.

What do I do? Like, I can't even absorb this feedback. Who's right? And I, so I say, part of your job running a company or heading a product, [00:11:00] product development, is to assimilate all this feedback. And at the end of the day, You have to decide which feedback you take and which feedback you reject. You're going to get contradictory feedback.

Uh, that is natural because people have different points of view. They see different things. They have different experience to draw upon. And they are going to say things that are maybe totally the opposite. But you have to remember that there is probably some truth into what, in what they say. You have to listen very carefully.

Because what seems like contradictory feedback. If you go deep enough, you might be seeing that they're actually making different points. So based on their experience and sometimes it will just be contradictory feedback and you'll have to decide who is right and who is wrong. And that's really the job of an innovator.

Project leader is to make those hard calls. And if you're stuck, you can do [00:12:00] several things. You do a gut check. Like what do you think? Right? At the end of the day, you have to make that decision. Also, you can go to other sources and get additional feedback and try to balance it out, and then you need to analyze the feedback.

So, when people give you feedback, you need to find out where they're coming from. Because a lot of times what the feedback, what people say, isn't what they mean. Uh, a lot of us will say, Oh, don't, this isn't working, but it actually, there's probably elements of it that are working. We will just oversimplify.

We'll say it's not working, you know, try this other direction when really what we're saying is that there's a piece of it that isn't working and you have to figure out what that piece is that is causing that person to say it isn't working. So you may have to start the question. The people you give feet who give you feedback in much more detail.

So really get inside [00:13:00] their heads and understand what it is that they're both that's bothering them and why it is. The fact is that most people can't articulate very clearly what is bothering them. So a lot of times they'll latch onto something. That seems like it's the problem, even though it isn't. And this is what makes it so difficult.

Um, because any type of product has so many variables in it and so much complexity. That when people give feedback, they often can't do it in a granular enough way to get at every little piece that it seems to be the problem or seems to be what what they want to improve. So your job as kind of the innovator of the leader is to come up with questions for them.

That get them to more deeply explain what they're thinking and what they're experiencing so you can better [00:14:00] understand actual feedback they are trying to express. 

Amy: Awesome. Thank you. That's great. So what are some of the most common mistakes that you see product teams and product leaders and entrepreneurs making in the earliest stages when they're bringing their idea to life?

Steve: The biggest mistake I see entrepreneurs make is that they fall in love. So they fall in love, but not with another person. Unfortunately, uh, that would be more fun. Uh, they fall in love with their product and, uh, when you're in love, I always say love is blind, so you, you know, when you're infatuated, you tend not to see it for what it really is.

Uh, and when people give you feedback, uh, saying Uhoh, you know, that person isn't right for you. If you're infatuated with them, you don't listen . So when you're in love with your product and you get feedback, you're like, no, no, no. You know, [00:15:00] you, you don't understand you. This is really good. You just don't get it.

So filters automatically go up, uh, that block them from taking a deeper look at their product and going. Deep with the people who are giving them the feedback because they really don't want to hear it So the advice I give startup founders, uh to try to prevent this is don't fall in love with your product. Who you need to love are your customers So you need to love them and they need to love your product.

So your job is to love them enough to really listen to them like you're doing a good relationship You And discover their psychology, what's in their head, what they're really thinking, and get them to the point where they are just crazy infatuated with your product. Because if they're infatuated with your product, then you win.

If you're infatuated with your product, you don't win. I mean, [00:16:00] that only helps you, actually it only hurts you, to be infatuated with your product. 

Amy: That's such a great point. We call that fall in love with the problem, not the product. It's probably a hard one. I mean, you and I have both probably earlier in our careers been in that position, right?

Steve: Oh, I have made that mistake. I have loved many, too many. I thought, you know, coming from the kind of artistic background, uh, that you were supposed to fall in love with your product. Like you were like this supposed to be passionately in love. And you know, the myth of the artist. The myth of the artist is that you don't listen to the world.

You do what your heart says, right? You, you, you know, the world is wrong and you are right and you are going to prove to the world that you have the vision and the insight and the passion to create something that nobody has ever seen. Vincent van Gogh all over again. But reality is seldom that way.

Reality is usually is you [00:17:00] can be passionately in love with your product and go off in your own direction, but then you got to get extremely lucky. You know that the world is also in love with whatever weird creation you're doing. 

Amy: I love it. It's just, you're really talking about something very deep, which is the core difference between art and design.

Steve: Yes, right. And I've had to grapple with that because my ambition, my mother was an artist, my father was an engineer, and they both told me to be an engineer. And so of course I wanted to be an artist. Like every, every day. 

Amy: Wow. 

Steve: And so I always adhered to the principles of mythology of art, right, the mythology of the great artist, the great thinker who was supposed to go out and invent the world based on their true passion and what was in their heart.

What I discovered the hard way. Is that the world doesn't function that way that is idealistic thinking and yes, you can get lucky. But like you look like the great [00:18:00] what a lot of the great artists not all you know, vincent van gogh Just you know, he's crazy. He went off and did his own thing. And then the world discovered him, you know after he died He had a miserable life unfortunately But other artists who are much more savvy and in tune with society like picasso and andy warhol You You know, those guys, they experimented a lot and they figured out what resonated with society at the time they were doing it, and they cranked it out in mass quantities.

Andy Warhol was a marketing machine, but Picasso too. He was a great marketer as well as a truly brilliant artist. But when you're inventing anything new, if you're going to get the in your lifetime and not gamble on You know getting them after you're dead. I think it really pays to engage, uh, society Look at cultural trends engage the people who ultimately will be consuming whatever you're making And that's a lesson.

I had to learn the hard way. 

Amy: [00:19:00] So tell us, how you got to be here, Steve? I know we could actually spend hours, but tell us how you got started. 

Steve: I'll tell you a personal story. So one of my products was a game. Cause I also like games because they combine our art with commerce and business and society and everything, you know, everything that I liked.

So, uh, one of my games was a virtual world, which, uh, was. I basically enabled avatars to walk across the web, and it was called Rocket On, and Rocket On was, uh, I was in love with it! I just loved the idea that you could go on Google, or Amazon, or any news site, and you could have your avatar pop up on the screen.

using a browser plugin, walk across the screen, meet other people on the same screen, and they could be talking about the news of the day, they could be talking [00:20:00] about their favorite book on, you know, Amazon and why they love it. You could see the sites where all your friends were, pop over to them. We had treasure hunts where you could jump through wormholes from one site to another, discover virtual goods that you could adorn your avatar with, you could go to the Gap and get clothing from the Gap and dress your avatar in Gap clothing, hence the business model, you could go to a music site with all the other fans and talk about your favorite band and collect music and all, all these cool things.

And dress like your favorite rock star or pop star. So all of this was like, I was just like, love it. I'd show it to people. We built it, it worked. They were like in trance. Everybody we showed it to was like, my God, that's the future of the internet. You guys are going to change everything. Everybody in Hollywood was interested.

We were signing deals. It was truly like, I was so in love with this that anybody who gave me negative feedback, I wouldn't listen. And the biggest network of feedback was coming from the users themselves. They, it [00:21:00] was at the same time Facebook was launching and all the users were like on Facebook and they would try our, our virtual world layered across the internet, spread all over the internet.

And they would like it at first, they would like, think it was totally cool and they'd be doing it. And then they would leave. And they wouldn't come back. And I was like, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. People have to get this. Like, it's so cool. They will have to do it. But the problem was that I wasn't seeing was that on this thing, you were mostly meeting strangers on these websites.

And the fundamentally people want to interact with their friends. They do not want to interact with strangers. It's like chat rooms, like most chat rooms have failed because it's about strangers. Whereas instant messengers, which are all about your friends have succeeded. Facebook, which is all about your friends has succeeded.

Our virtual world, like Second Life and many of these other [00:22:00] virtual worlds tended to be less about your friends and more about just going in and exploring and meeting people and doing things like that. And then the other element that I failed to see was that the gameplay element in these virtual worlds, in our virtual world in particular, wasn't strong enough.

So there wasn't the game mechanics. If you have game mechanics, you can play with a stranger. It doesn't matter. You are into the game. But when it's socializing, when that's the fundamental mechanic is socializing, then you need to be, usually you have to be with friends. That's it. 

Amy: I'm glad you said that because there's actually data that supports that.

And it's really true. 

Steve: I didn't know this data and I wasted so much time and so much money. 

Amy: Yeah. Oh, then what happened? 

Steve: And you know, we basically had to scrap it. That was the bottom line. We had to kill it because at the end of the day, you have to listen to your users. And I could have discovered that lesson [00:23:00] easily eight months earlier, eight months earlier, I, the, the writing was clear.

If I analyzed what user behavior was. I would have scrapped it, but you know what I did? I did what every true passionate entrepreneur does or artists does. I kept adding more features. I kept thinking one more feature and it will work. Everything will click into place. I didn't realize that the core feature, the core feature didn't work.

And it doesn't matter how many additional elements you add. Once you put up the core, if it doesn't work, you're dead. It's like the minimum viable product lesson. This was before MVP really became a big thing. You know, before Eric Ries and, you know, the whole lean startup. 

Amy: Well, game designers did that long before lean startup was a thing.

When I worked on successful games, we always started with a small tight core and got that right. Because if you don't, you're building a leaky bucket. 

Steve: You're right. [00:24:00] And our bucket was super leaky. And you know, the irony is I wrote a book on game design. I knew that lesson. And I ignored it. I was so passionate about the product succeeding.

I was so in love with it that I wrote a book on it and ignored it. 

Amy: But that in itself is such good wisdom because when it's your baby, when you were in the driver's seat, all these people are whispering in your ear saying, is this going to succeed? You want my money, et cetera, et cetera. It's. Easy to forget the things that you wrote books about or counsel other people about, et cetera.

And that's part of why people need partners and coaches and, you know, people to hold them accountable. 

Steve: Absolutely. And the irony is you don't realize the pressure you're under. So I'd raised a good amount of venture capital on this one. I'd raised like 5 million and that's a lot for an unproven product.

Too much money. And because it was too much money, I raised you [00:25:00] know, the money can blind you, right? You're like, oh, I took their money, I sold them on this vision, we have to figure it out, and we have the money to figure it out. The problem is, money doesn't matter, you know? It's just like the guy who did Slack, right?

He was making his game and it wasn't working, and he had too much money, so he spent too long working on the game. I did the same mistake, and it's so easy to do, and I'll probably make that mistake, hopefully I don't. Hopefully I learned the hard way, and I don't do it, but you never know. 

Amy: So, if you were going to give one piece of advice to an innovator or entrepreneur who really wants to build a compelling product that people, that's not a leaky bucket.

The people will use, but feels unsure of what the best approach is. What would you tell that person to do? 

Steve: So I always say, well, don't listen to your heart. Do not listen to your heart. Listen to the data and gather the data early. Like push data gathering as [00:26:00] far forward as you possibly can build as little as possible as you possibly can, because the more you build, you fall in love with it, what you build.

It's the Ikea effect, right? When you build your own furniture, Ikea is brilliant. You fall in love with that furniture. You know, they knew it. You don't return it because you built it. So when you build your product, the less you build, the better off you are and figuring out ways to Uh, to gather data early in the process with doing as little work as possible is really the challenging part.

How do you do these experiments? How can you get meaningful data without even a prototype? You know, is there a way to go to customers and simulate your business, uh, early on with, uh, very, you know, videos, powerpoints, Acting it out, uh, you know, doing, uh, when we do game prototyping, we do paper prototypes because they're a paper prototype you're not as invested in and you can get it up and running faster.

All these things are so [00:27:00] important, uh, in the process. And I know you have a whole methodology on this. 

Amy: And exactly that, that's exactly what we speed up and give you guidance in. That's what people need. And that's why you and I are buddies. And everything you just said made my heart sing because I'm glad you're saying it.

I'm glad your message is out there. I'm glad you're spreading it in China where so many amazing entrepreneurs are and so many great products and services and apps and all kinds of stuff is coming out of, so... 

Steve: And they need to innovate here. So they have shortcut this process by copying from Silicon Valley.

Right. So when you copy something that works, you don't have to go through this painful, messy process, but now they have to innovate. Uh, they're, they're being forced to, uh, because there's so many entrepreneurs, you can't really copy and succeed and be guaranteed of any sort of success. So this sort of teaching is particularly relevant in China as well as around the world right now.

Amy: I see it in India a lot too. India has [00:28:00] really shifted from a place that, that does it outsourcing to a place with a lot of creativity, entrepreneurship, ideas of solving problems, its own special ecosystem, uh, and how to innovate successfully and not just be it outsourcing. It's been going on for years, but I'm just being awaken to it. 

So it's a very exciting time, um, throughout Asia and particularly in China. So I would ask you one other question, Steve, when you look back on your career and your transition from an artist into, um, an entrepreneur coach and a startup coach and a expert in innovation, what do you feel is your superpower?

What is your sweet spot? 

Steve: Okay, I'll tell you, I know this after trying many things and finding out they weren't my superpower. I thought I had all these superpowers and one thing I found is that no matter what you want to be your [00:29:00] superpower, uh, you should find out what your superpower really is because a lot of times we want to be good at what we're not good at.

And that was one of the big lessons I learned. So there are many things I thought I was good at that I just wasn't that good at. And analytics. I found out I'm not the best at analytics. I mean, there's some people who kind of want people who are really good at going deep on the numbers and figuring out what they are.

I thought, you know, I have an engineering background too. I'm really good at math, but I'm just not good at that because, you know, fundamentally I don't care. I'm not passionate enough about it. So I need to partner with people. You know are super analytical and we'll do that piece. I'll tell you what i'm really good at i'm really good My one superpower is articulating complex ideas in a way that people can understand So I'm a really good teacher because I can take ideas that are kind of abstract and, and, and hard to digest and hard to wrap your head about, and I can [00:30:00] make them fun.

I can make it so people like get it in a simple way and they kind of are inspired to go out and try it. So that is why I focused a lot of our efforts on teaching because I was, Oh, I'm actually really, really good at that, even though it's something I never wanted to do. I just wanted to create and build, but I found out actually helping other people create and build has taught me a lot and is something I can add a lot of value.

Amy: And your enthusiasm shines through. It's wonderful. So, uh, one last question, what are the trends that you're following? You are clearly inspiring a lot of people, myself included. What's inspiring you? What's feeding you? What trends are you paying attention to? What are you seeing in your world? 

Steve: So I travel the world a lot now, so I'm traveling like 70 percent of my time, sort of the opposite of you, who's doing everything in a smarter, more remote way.

I love travel, so I love learning, [00:31:00] and I love being exposed to other cultures and other peoples. So I'm seeing trends globally, like I see, I'm going really deep now on how Chinese do business, how they approach business, the psychology. Of how they make deals and do deals and think of the world and think of, uh, developing products and markets and all that stuff.

So I'm absorbing that, uh, now, and because I'm getting immersed in all these different cultures and different ways of thinking, it is broadening how I think about the world, how I do business, and how I can teach. So many of the trends I'm seeing are innovation happening globally, but in different ways in different countries.

So in china, they're innovating in a different way. So China is ahead of the U. S. in certain categories. In certain areas like technology, they still copy like crazy, but in areas like WeChat, which is their big social network, their big instant messenger, they have innovated far beyond. Facebook is actually looking and copying China [00:32:00] because commerce on WeChat has gone to a whole new level.

So in WeChat, their social network, you use it for everything. People like I don't need to carry cash in China and all my friends in China no longer use cash. We just use our social network to buy everything. They have these QR codes, which aren't big in the U S but they're huge in China. QR codes are used for commerce.

They're used for marketing. They're used to just connect with people and form groups. Everything. WeChat has built into it a whole ecosystem. So they have built into it, kind of the, they've sucked the entire internet into WeChat. So you don't really go out to a web browser now. You browse everything through your social network.

They actually have these micro apps. in WeChat where you engage with the app, but you don't even download an app on your phone. You have the apps within the instant messenger. So all of this is very, very telling on innovation. [00:33:00] And I'll tell you when I go back to Silicon Valley in the respect of what they've done in social networks, I feel like we're behind. We actually, 

Amy: You are correct. China is ahead of us. What you just described is ahead of us, but that's been true for a while. When I was working on avatar worlds in like 2002, I looked at Japan for leadership and career. And I saw it and we were, we were being inspired by that. 

Steve: Yeah. So different countries are doing different.

I was just giving one example. Yeah. Countries are doing different things ahead of us. And, uh, it's great when we can learn and they can learn, and that's the whole process of us innovating together. One other thing I love is reading. So, I'm a huge audiobook fan, and I try to get through a new audiobook every week if I can.

Luckily, I travel a lot, and so I can always listen on the plane, I can listen, you know, in the taxi, I do it at double speed, [00:34:00] so I go through twice as fast, I crank up, they talk really, really fast in the audiobook, but I can absorb a lot of information, and I try to not just do business books or books on product development.

I try to get as many information sources as possible. So I read great literature. I read philosophy. I read books on ethnography, books on science and and and culture and art. And I think absorbing from all those trends are where innovation really happens because innovation doesn't just happen in a tech business bubble.

Right, with Harvard MBAs and MIT engineers getting together, that's not where it happens. It happens at the multidisciplinary intersections, where they overlap. So I think the more people you can expose yourself to who are really smart and doing things totally outside your realm of knowledge and suck them into your world and collaborate with them in the more books and information sources from outside your [00:35:00] core knowledge base, where you feel comfortable.

Pushing yourself to grab those and pull them into your world will really open up the new avenues of innovation that you never would dream possible. So that's what I encourage everybody to do. That's kind of how I try to live my life and what I try to do, and it's where I'm still an entrepreneur. I'm running my business.

I'm innovating every day on my current business, and that's where most of my great ideas come from. 

Amy: Fantastic. Steve, thank you so much for sharing your time and your great stories and your wisdom with us. 

Steve: Thank you. 

Outro: Thanks for listening to Getting2Alpha with Amy Jo Kim, the shows that help you innovate faster and smarter.

Be sure to check out our website, getting2alpha.com. That's getting2alpha.com for more great resources and podcast [00:36:00] episodes.