Stewards Of The Future

• all classes from actors, singers, musicians, business people, and writers …. Almost none of them have a direct path. Anybody on a direct path I would be skeptical of.
• I resonate with this idea that is often attributed to Jerry Garcia of The Grateful Dead, which is

• In conversation with Pete Flint, Adam Grant called this a cognitive entrenchment — when Founders get too attached to their existing patterns of thinking, they become prisoners of their own prototypes.
• They’re impri...

• Now, the startups would like to do that too, but they don’t have any resources. So they have to be really scrappy and they have to invent. That’s the solution that is going to spread and succeed because they have used genius to solve it instead of money.
• The problem...

• One of my missions is to be a good ancestor — this is counter in some ways to the mission of a young startup
• I think that taking a longer view of things can set you apart.
• you think more about civilizational scale, infrastructural necessities, and feeding the network

• long-term research. To last more than four years
• No vehicle for funding some kind of basic research that you have no expectation of making sense or being developed at least for 20 years — and maybe during your lifetime.
• You might need another kind of an institution that would...

• The major parents of Wired were Louis Rossetto and Jane Metcalfe. I was trying to put out a magazine, a similar kind of magazine. It was called Signal. But the difference was I was talking about ideas and tools in this new emerging world. And Louis and Jane, their creative genius was saying,...

By necessity, Founders are rooted in the “here and now” mental framework required for launching a new startup.

But *great* Founders do something different at the same time: They are obsessed with what will endure 10 or 50 years from now.

Kevin Kelly helps you rise to that level. He is...

• What happens is the startups are left to keep doing things until they pass some threshold of basic viable customer satisfaction. And at that point, it’s too late, they’re off to races.
• That’s the advantage for startups. What that means for startups is you need to am...

• The secret of this world of network communications is that they exhibit network effects in all dimensions. If you can tap into one, it’s wonderful because you can go for quite a ride. All kinds of aspects of our lives are affected...

• You, me, and the smartest 50 people that we knew, we could not make an iPhone, right? From scratch, it just requires so many other technologies, which themselves require other ones. That is “The technium,” which has all the technologies in the world tied together. There’s this lo...