Summary of “Bold” by Peter H.

Diamandis, Steven Kotler

How to create wealth and impact the world

Written by Bookey
About the book
Exponential technology is influencing and
reshaping our lives drastically. It also creates big
opportunities for innovative entrepreneurs who
want to start their businesses. This book describes
ways to use exponential technology and introduces
several important exponential tools to build
successful companies. You can get practical
entrepreneurial advice from this book if you have a
goal to become an entrepreneur. Alternatively, if
you don't have such a goal, you can still gain a
clearer understanding of this fast-changing world.
About the author
This book was authored by Peter H. Diamandis and
Steven Kotler. As a global leader in commercial
space exploration, Peter H. Diamandis was named
“The World’s 50 Greatest Leaders” by Fortune in
2014. To encourage innovation for the benefit of
humanity, he has set up the “XPRIZE Foundation”,
which has granted prizes in fields such as
spaceflight, environmental protection, automotive,
and healthcare. Steven Kotler is a famous
American best-selling author and veteran journalist.
In 2012, the two authors co-published Abundance:
The Future is Better Than You Think.
Chapter 1: Overview
Hi, welcome to Bookey. Today we will unlock the
book Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth, and
Impact the World. Do you know Elon Musk? He
is the CEO of SpaceX, Tesla, and SolarCity. As a
successful cross-industry serial entrepreneur, Musk
seems to have a constant passion for advancing the
path to entrepreneurship. Initially, Musk didn’t
want to start a business. He just wanted to get a job
at Netscape, But he failed as he was not good at
interpersonal communication. As a result, he
decided to code and founded Zip2, which was later
acquired by Compaq for $307 million. Musk
earned his first bucket of gold. Then, with a firm
goal and eternal passion, Musk entered the rocket,
automobile, and solar energy industries. He created
a huge business empire worth about $30 billion in
12 years. How did Elon Musk become so
successful? The answer is, it is through access to
exponential technology in various fields, including
the Internet, clean energy, and space exploration.
So, what is this exponential technology? The
authors tell us that “exponential technology” refers
to any technology that develops on an exponential
growth curve and multiplies its power regularly.
This explanation may still sound abstract. Let’s
look at some examples. In technology or business
news, we often hear or read about technologies like
3-D printing, cloud services, artificial intelligence,
and genomics. These are all exponential
technologies. Exponential technology can bring
exponential changes. For example, the smartphones
we use today cost only one-millionth of a
supercomputer in the 1970s. And still, it’s 1,000
times more powerful than that supercomputer.
Exponential technology influences and reshapes
our lives with great power. It also creates big
opportunities for innovative entrepreneurs who
want to start their businesses. These entrepreneurs
who use exponential technology to start a business,
the authors call them “exponential entrepreneurs”.
In this book, the authors elaborate on the methods
of using exponential technology to build successful
businesses. They also share their own
entrepreneurial experience and introduce several
critical exponential tools. If you’re a reader with a
goal of becoming an entrepreneur, you can get
practical entrepreneurial advice from this book.
Alternatively, if you’re a regular reader, you can
still get a better understanding of this fast-changing
world. The two authors of this book are Peter H.
Diamandis and Steven Kotler. As a global leader in
commercial space exploration, Peter H. Diamandis
was named one of “The World’s 50 Greatest
Leaders” by Fortune in 2014. To encourage
innovation for the benefit of humanity, Diamandis
has set up the “XPRIZE Foundation”, which has
granted prizes in fields such as spaceflight,
environmental protection, automotive, and
healthcare. Steven Kotler is a famous American
best-selling author and a veteran journalist who has
won numerous awards. In 2012, Diamandis and
Kotler co-published Abundance: The Future is
Better Than You Think. This book is like a bright
light shining the path of capable entrepreneurs
caught up in a growing business. This time, they
co-authored Bold: How to Go Big, Create Wealth,
and Impact the World. It provides entrepreneurs
with a practical guide to action, and it has gained
critical acclaim from the global business
community. In this Bookey, we will explore how
companies can achieve exponential growth in three
parts: Part 1: Developing big business
opportunities with exponential technologies Part
2: The three laws of entrepreneurship Part 3:
Exponential tools to help entrepreneurs grow
rapidly.
Chapter 2: Developing big
business opportunities with
exponential technologies
Let’s look at the characteristics of exponential
technologies first. These characteristics are known
as the “Six Ds”, which stands for digitalization,
deception, disruption, demonetization,
dematerialization, and democratization. These are
also the six necessary stages of exponential
technology’s development. Let’s talk about them
one by one. “Digitalization” is made possible
with the advent of computers at the beginning of
the 20th century, in which we see an exponential
growth of using digital methods to express, store,
and exchange ideas. Everything, including our
combined knowledge can be digitized and then
transmitted, copied, and shared at the speed of light.
This is why the first word of the Six Ds is
digitalization. Once a technology completes the
transition from a physical process to a digital one,
it follows Moore’s law and grows exponentially,
becoming what we call exponential technology.
“Deception” refers to the characteristic in which
the development rate of an exponential technology
in the early stage is not very fast. It is difficult to
predict when this technology will take off, which
presents a “deception.” The resolution of the first
digital camera was only 0.01 pixels. Then it
doubled from 0.01 to 0.02, from 0.02 to 0.04, and
from 0.04 to 0.08. Even if it is constantly doubling,
the progress still seems very small. However, for
exponential growth, it only needs to multiply 30
times to increase by a factor of one billion.
Exponential technology’s initial growth may seem
trivial at first, but when it reaches a certain
threshold, it sees an exponential growth. This is the
“deception” of exponential growth. What follows
“deception” is “disruption”. In 2020, the resolution
of our mobile phone cameras have reached tens of
millions of pixels, which seems to be a long way
from the initial 0.01 pixels. In fact, from the first
digital camera’s appearance in 1975 to the present,
it only took us under 50 years to achieve such a feat.
Kodak didn’t expect the rapid development of
digital camera technology and stayed in the
traditional film industry. Therefore, it gave up the
leading position in the industry. The technical
replacement of film cameras by digital cameras is
an example of a “disruption.” As we all know,
Kodak has disappeared from the camera market.
“Demonetization” means that goods and services
that used to be paid for are now free. For example,
Skype allows people to make long-distance calls
for free; Napster allows people to listen to
high-quality music for free. These are typical
examples of “demonetization.”
“Dematerialization” refers to goods and services no
longer appearing in a physical way. For example,
e-books and mobile payments have replaced paper
books and paper money. “Democratization” is
the last step in exponential development. It's the
inevitable result of “demonetization” and
“dematerialization.” It means that we can enjoy
many services at a low cost and with simple
operation. Nowadays, mobile phones are getting
cheaper and more functional. When we travel, we
no longer need to bring a lot of physical items like
DVDs, books, or maps. A small mobile phone is
enough. Besides, today’s mobile phones can be
easily used without complicated tutorials. This is
typical of “democratization." We can see that every
step in the development of exponential technology
is oriented towards making people’s life more
convenient. After learning the characteristics of
exponential technology, let’s look at several crucial
exponential technologies. This book introduces five
exponential technologies that have changed the
world. We will focus on three of them: network and
sensor, infinite computing, and artificial
intelligence. These technologies are relatively
mature and likely to continue to develop
exponentially, and therefore provide significant
entrepreneurial opportunities. The first of the
three exponential technologies is network and
sensor. The main application area of this
technology is information and automation. Sensors
can detect radiation, temperature, humidity, etc.,
and transmit information through a network
connection. Devices like mobile phones and tablets
that we use daily are a hybrid of sensors. In fact,
sensors are used in many devices that help us in our
daily life. For instance, sensors in cars can help us
drive, sensors on roads can help us avoid traffic
jams, and sensors in parking lots can help us find
free parking spaces. Each product iteration requires
more sophisticated sensors, which leads to
increasing demand for sensors. A smart home
company, SmartThings, has made significant
innovations with sensors. It has created an interface
that consists of a variety of sensors. With this
interface, you can easily control more than 1,000
smart household appliances. When you leave home
without locking your doors and windows, the
sensors will alert you. Additionally, they can
automatically help you turn off your household
appliances before you go to bed. The second
crucial exponential technology is infinite
computing. Forty years ago, computational power
was costly, and a computer equipment was huge.
But now, a common chip in a mobile phone can
perform about a billion operations per second. And
the further you go, the cheaper computational
power will become. Big companies such as Google,
Amazon, and Backspace have all opened cloud
computing services to the public. In this way,
ordinary companies can use big companies’ infinite
computational power to solve problems. In the past,
when we wanted to create a technology company,
we needed to rent equipment, which needed to be
programmed, debugged and maintained, which was
time-consuming and labor-intensive. But now we
can solve all these problems with the convenience
of cloud computing. In this book, Diamandis
shares his experience of visiting Autodesk, where
the chief executive of Autodesk, Carl Bass, showed
him an electric go-kart design. Carl Bass told him
that, in the past, in order to install an electric motor
into a vehicle, he needed to draw a picture
manually and calculate the thickness and position
of the bracket. It would take multiple calculations
to find the right measurement. But now people can
use a computer model to do all of these things,
saving time and effort. With the development of
infinite computing, he could run design simulations
with cloud computing in the future. The third
crucial exponential technology introduced in the
book is artificial intelligence. At the time the
authors wrote this book, artificial intelligence was
transitioning from the deception stage to disruption
stage. Oftentimes, advanced artificial intelligence
in movies seems far from reality. Yet, many
companies have now introduced robots to replace
humans. About 80% of our work is based on the
basic skills of seeing, reading, writing, and
integrating knowledge. Artificial intelligence is
accelerating its learning process in all of these
aspects. In February 2011, IBM’s artificial
intelligence Watson participated in the knowledge
quiz show Jeopardy and defeated human players. In
November 2013, IBM uploaded Watson to the
cloud and opened it to the public. It also set up a
venture fund to support start-ups that use Watson.
Modernizing Medicine was one such start-ups that
started a close collaboration with IBM and used
Watson. Before the partnership, Modernizing
Medicine had its own electronic medical record
platform. Every dermatologist who has registered
on this website can publish patient’s medical
records and treatment plans under the premise of
keeping patient information secret. Through
providing a platform for dermatologists to share
information, Modernizing Medicine has deepened
medical communication and improved treatments.
By 2014, Modernizing Medicine was using Watson
to combine treatment plans and results with
research data to provide doctors with instant
information. Additionally, Watson can answer
millions of questions and provide the source and
basis of the answers. It has become a powerful
medical Q&A tool. Now that we’ve learned about
the characteristics of exponential technologies and
three specific examples, let's now take a look at the
prerequisites to use them to achieve exponential
growth. Psychologist Edwin Locke has
researched great business leaders and found one
key trait they all shared: vision. A forward-looking
vision is a prerequisite for better use of exponential
technologies. So how do we get such
forward-looking vision? The two authors believe
that we need to understand the deception feature of
exponential technology. Many technologies are not
as magical as their marketing would have you
believe when they first appear. Therefore, the
public’s expectation of this technology is ruined,
and they may think that it’s of no use. However,
business leaders with forward-looking vision can
recognize this deception and seize the opportunity
to evolve. Apart from forward-looking vision,
most entrepreneurs who successfully establish and
promote their businesses are courageous and
fearless, just like the title of this book — Bold. Jeff
Bezos himself is an entrepreneur with vision and
boldness. In 1986, Bezos graduated from
Princeton University with a degree in computer
science and electrical engineering. Shortly after
graduation, he became the vice president at the
Wall Street firm of D.E Shaw. Four years later,
Bezos discovered the exponential development
potential of Internet technology and decided to
seize this opportunity to start his entrepreneurial
career. He bet a large portion of his parents' life
savings on the start-up fund for Amazon. Bezos
chose books as the first product to sell online,
because he found that the number of books
exceeded any other product. Furthermore,
computers were good at organizing a mass of
products, and no physical stores could hold so
many books. It turned out that Bezos was right.
Compared to traditional bookstores, Amazon offers
a 24-hour one-click shopping service, which is very
convenient. Six months later, Amazon's market
value reached $1.2 billion. After achieving initial
success, Bezos insisted on running the company
with a long-term vision. He explored traditional
industries such as music, movies and electronics,
all the while growing the types of products Amazon
sold. Amazon's original business has expanded
from selling book to selling e-books and even
producing e-readers, in response to the needs of the
times. Meanwhile, Amazon also launched a cloud
computing service and became a dark horse in the
industry. In the development of Amazon, Bezos has
always adhered to a long-term vision and ideas
centered around customers. He is not afraid of
failure and keeps trying. These qualities enable him
to seize every opportunity of exponential
technology development, leading the company
from one success to another. That was Part 1 on
developing big business opportunities with
exponential technologies. First, we learned about
the six characteristics of exponential technologies:
digitalization, deception, disruption,
demonetization, dematerialization, and
democratization. Then, we learned about three
mature exponential technologies that have
significant entrepreneurial opportunities. Finally,
we learned that having a forward-looking vision
and the courage to be bold are the prerequisites for
seizing the opportunity for exponential growth.
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