Axel Schultze started and successfully exited 4 companies, the biggest reaching $5 Billion in revenue, the second close to $1 Billion. Axel is a published author, patent holder, 2015 listed in the global 100 most influential startup accelerators, 2008 won the SF Entrepreneur Award, 2006 chaired the SaaS Channel Committee at the SIIA, 2003 early adviser of LinkedIn.
2001 Founder & CEO of Silicon Valley based BlueRoads a partner management software.
Initially funded by The Angels Forum, then venture funded by Eldorado Ventures, Cardinal Ventures and Arrow Path. Named most successful channel management company in 2006. Exit in 2007.
1997 Pioneered equity-based crowdfunding – Sold it in 2001.
1996 Founder & CEO Infinigate, Leading European IT security provider. Funded through private placement on Webstock. Today over $600 Million in revenue.
1983 Founder & CEO Computer 2000 a $5 Billion high tech distributor. With a highly disruptive business model bypassed 8,000 tech distributors and became the third largest in the world. VC Funded by Deutsche Bank WFG. IPO in 1996. merged with Tech Data at $5 Billion in revenue in 1998.
We Talk About
What questions should one ask themselves or brainstorming should be done before starting a company?
What is the best advice for someone is plans on starting and growing a billion-dollar company with their significant other?
Why does brainstorming to create a billion-dollar idea seem to fail when it is done in a corporate setting, but succeed when it is done by a startup?
Connect with Axel
https://www.linkedin.com/in/axelschultze/
Website
Enterprise Workflow Intelligence Company
CONNECT WITH SHAWN
Announcer 00:00
You’re listening to the Silicon Valley podcast.
Shawn Flynn 00:02
On today’s show, we sit down with Axel Schultz, who started and successfully exited four companies, the biggest reaching 5 billion in revenue, and the second close to 1 billion. Axel is a published author and a patent holder in 2015. listed in the global 100 most influential startup accelerators, he started in 2008. He won the SF Entrepreneur Award 2006 and he chaired the SAS channel committee at the SIIA, and in 2003, he was an early advisor of LinkedIn. On today’s show, we talked about what questions should one ask themselves, or what brainstorm is should be done before starting a company? What is the best advice for someone who plans on starting and growing a billion-dollar company with their significant other and why does brainstorm and to create a billion-dollar idea seemed to fail when it’s done in a corporate setting, but thrive when is done by a startup? This is much more today’s episode. And remember, you could follow me at Shawn Flynn SV on Twitter, and like and subscribe to this show and share in your network. It encourages to create more content just like this. All right. Now let’s start this amazing episode of the Silicon Valley podcast. Enjoy.
Announcer 01:20
Welcome to the Silicon Valley podcast with your host Shawn Flynn, who interviews famous entrepreneurs, venture capitalists and leaders in tech, learn their secrets and see tomorrow’s world today.
Shawn Flynn 01:37
Axel, thank you for taking the time today to be on the Silicon Valley podcast. Now you were introduced by a mutual friend of ours George Parrish. He said some amazing things about you. So I’m really excited about this interview. And before we even start, can you give our audience a little bit of background of your career up into this point?
Axel Schultze 01:54
Happy to be here Shawn, this is great. This is actually really amazing. For me, I started my career actually, as a, you know, employee, like many others in a large company, Rockwell International, this idea while running distribution, to change the model of distribution, because most distributors sell direct and indirect and to everybody, and so on. And most of the resellers and system integrators. They feel basically a competition by their main supplier. I thought, No, this is not right. And I went to my boss and said, Hey, I think we need to change distribution. I was just about to tell him, how we’re going to do is and he’s excellent. You are totally insane distributions of 5000-year-old business intervolving across the globe, and you want to change it. I mean, you are crazy. So I was like, Oh, God, yeah, bummer. I had this amazing idea. And the next day, I thought, No, this is a great idea. It doesn’t matter if it goes south, then I will still try to do it. Fast forward. I left my dream job, actually. I mean, I had extreme Steve’s career, and I move on to starting that company. And I went to my boss and said, you know, it’s crazy. But I still tried and I want to quit. And he said, What? Okay, so are you serious about that? And he said, Yeah, I’m serious. And then it happened, something interesting. He said, you know, you have investors, and I said, Yeah, I have some savings, but not really investors. Oh, I could imagine actually investing. And then I thought, Wow, you think this is crazy, but not investing. The irony is that he and somebody else thought this is totally insane. Both invested. And a year later, he actually joined the team, and the other to the idea of us having a theory very robust, but back then, in the term didn’t exist a disruptive business model. We did that for six months. And then sort of, you know, reality caught up with us. And indeed, because of the model, it didn’t make enough margin to actually sustain the whole business to founders then said, Hey, x, I, you know, come on and deal with the mainstream and like everybody else’s and not I didn’t quit this job for running just an ordinary distributor. Really, last minute. We got this one order from a large company who said, Okay, so I’ll try your strategy and help you because he wouldn’t want to buy direct, indirect. And so we got this order, and I gave it to one of the resellers. And little did I know that this reseller was actually on the board of the IBM reseller Association. And so he was blown away with 1000 graphics cards. I mean, this was a huge deal back then I said, Yeah, I promised we don’t go direct. A week later, there was a dealer Association meeting and he must have explained it to the rest of the gang and all of a sudden orders came in like you know, it was like a movie. I mean, nobody could write a script better than that the company grew and grew and grew. IPO in 1996, add 5 billion in revenue. And later on, we merged with Tech Data was merger on the equals at 7 billion in revenue. And so the combined company was 12, something like that. And today, it’s 37 and a half billion I just checked, the impossible thing actually became a $37 billion company, a global leader in tech distribution, no tech product, basically. But distributions, that was a pure business model case. So I exited, I had fun in my life, you know what everybody else is doing crazy things, throwing around with money, which is totally stupid. But you know, you do that. And then I started a new company. And this was in 19. Actually, this was in 1996. So the other was a little before, this was right when the internet popped up. And we focused on internet security, because we thought I mean, this will be probably a big deal. And so today, this company is 750 million in revenue. And when we stepped down, I think like, four years into it, and let my co-founder run it and move to the States. One thing was interesting in between, we were looking for funding. And I promised my one of my VCs that, you know, if I’m starting something new, I will talk to him. And I said, Okay, so I do my promise I talk to you. And fortunately, we’re not raising venture capital money. But we want to do a crowdfunding campaign. And he said, what is a crowdfunding campaign? I said, I don’t know. And I probably use a different word because it didn’t really exist. But we wrote, basically a web page with forums, that investor could say, Yeah, I want to invest, and I want to invest so and so much, it was meant to be for our business partners, maybe interested in investing to did but we thought about hundreds of other investors. And the interesting thing was after, I think, three months, somebody called me and said, Hey, Mr. Schultz, I bought these shares, but I just read that this is not even on a stock exchange. And I know that I signed up for it. But can you do me a favor? I need to get rid of it? Because my husband is terribly crazy about this, and I should not have done it. its own said Absolutely. You know, I’ll buy a bag. And we’re done. I thought, okay, I asked a couple investors, just to be fair, but I’m not sort of, you know, buying back stuff without them knowing. And somebody said, Hey, why don’t you put this up on the web, people can basically bid on it. And she makes even a profit I did while we had our first digital Stock Exchange. Six months later, the authorities came and said, No way. We said, Okay, this is bad, because we had 600 investors by then I went to my lawyer, and he said, before I get involved, because this would be a long fight, you know, you don’t want to have you ask her? What is actually the exact paragraph where she relates to what is illegal in this case? That’s an interesting question. And so I called her and she said, Well, unfortunately, there is none. So we’re actually not really illegal yet. But she will need to do everything possible to make it illegal. And I said, Okay, can we operate till then? And she said, you know, what, probably, yes, even your help to tell me a little bit more what you do. And so we can negotiate this deal, that we could run the stock exchange, so to speak for a year with a special permission. And I told the team of her, I told her everything, how we do it, how the transactions work, how the market maker function works, and all these kinds of details of the company, then to the largest stock broker in Germany, and focused on my, you know, other company that we were actually funding. I was amazing ride. And I think it’s still the question is, what did I do? I went to California. And that was always my dream, I mean, running a company in Silicon Valley. And so the dream was about a technology that we developed already in Germany, of handling business partners on a digital kind of platform and try to get Citrix and a couple of companies in Germany and they said, Now, you know, headquarters, say now we will do this in the US and blah, blah, blah. And so I said, you know what, this is exactly what I needed to hear my wife and we discussing, or shall we go to the US now? Yep, let’s do that. And so we moved over. In 2000. It was right after the bubble crashed. And we said okay, we’ll still give it a try. Then we were running for funding and basically, about a year later, and the first meeting was September 11. And so you can imagine what that Kind of we know there’s no funding for a long time. And so we had to bootstrap. And then some of the investors said, you have actually two problems when you’re not a Silicon Valley person. So you will have to develop another level of trust before you get money. And these days, nobody has money. But the third one, which I didn’t tell you in the beginning, is you have to invest two competitors. One has 68 million in the bank from pre bubble IPO, and the other had from pre bubble fundraising and 58 million in the bank. I mean, they’re blowing you away, just by the sheer capitally. All right, we still have go bootstrapping. I mean, I heard this is impossible before. And for me, it became almost my personal hashtag impossible. I really respond to we know that we had something special. And we know most people wouldn’t really understand. Probably lack of communication. We built this apparatus of lead management and everything. And about three years into it, we realized, okay, we’re, I mean, two years, are really on a great trajectory. And actually, fundraising was in this scenario, not a real big problem. So people actually said, Yeah, absolutely interesting, and so on. We grew it to number one. So we became market leader in that space. And then the investors had a little bit of different opinion how it goes forward, I thought, maybe we were successful together. And so maybe now we can all be successful. Each Other alone, I stepped actually down, I didn’t want to follow their advice. And but you know, that’s often the case, there was my fourth company actually, kind of retired. I mean, we did retire for a year, which was nothing good for me. So we help startups. So we started in 2014, then San Francisco building accelerator, and help basically scale up startups. So not the very early stage, but those who already had maybe a seed funding round or so and help them to succeed. And this was actually really fun. Also, in retrospect, there was a company called back then it was Dr. dice. Now, the URL is simply doc.com. And it’s sort of a doctors of medical platform, as a unicorn in Mexico, and is now entering the US, it’s on as a very cool story in a couple of others. And that is basically my more or less my previous life, so to speak of a past life. And one of the things was interesting, somebody asked me, I actually did all these ideas coming from so I need to know, tell me, and I realized I can’t really answer it, it was very difficult. As a sorry, we’ll probably talk later. But that is sort of my, my life.
Shawn Flynn 12:57
Axel, I have to go back to that one moment. It seems like a pivotal point in your life, when your boss had actually laughed at you, when you brought that idea. But then you came back and you said, I still want to do this. Most entrepreneurs, most people, I would say, if their boss laughed at them, they would go home, think it was a dumb idea, maybe have a few drinks, and then just continue with life for the next 40 years working under that person and what was different inside of you to go back the next day.
Axel Schultze 13:26
It wasn’t quite the next day because I went home, like I said, took a beer. I was frustrated. I think I don’t do it. And it was a couple of days in and out and thinking is really stunted dumb or not. And I personally found it totally logical. But I also realized, you know, it’s between logic and what is possible in a world is different. I simply try to weigh between, okay, if this goes wrong, what would I do, then? I probably would look for a job again. And if it goes, right, obviously, that will be cool. And then there was one person that honestly don’t remember who that was. But this is the one where I heard this phrase the first time. The worst thing you can do in your life is not trying. And that triggered me to guess. Yeah. I mean, at least trying. If I don’t try, I will never know. I will probably die wondering well, what would I have done 60 years ago when I had this idea. So that was actually the main trick.
Shawn Flynn 14:33
All these companies that you started, I mean, you had success after success after success. What questions were you asking yourself, or what brainstorming did you do before finally jumping in and started them?
Axel Schultze 14:46
Most people have an idea, I believe, also when I talk to startups, and then they kind of rush into making this a reality. We had in the first company for instance, computer 2000 we had about four months needed. We call this aef meetings or something like this action setting on your own feet. And one of my partners said, you know, the idea is, I mean substantial. But if we don’t make it perfect, and we are all trained to not go for perfect, but for 8020 rules, but he said, we need to break this rule, and we need to make it perfect. And so we called it the debayer process, you know, the bears the diamond guys, you know, polishing, the idea does really perfect, nobody can crack it. And so that’s what we did. And it worked well. And I simply kept to this metaphor of polishing to perfection, before you actually go, I think it was my third company. And I always had sort of not doubts, per se, but respect for what may come. But I always worked on it to the point where I said, Okay, if I cannot come up with a problem that is unsolvable, going forward, and will break the company, and then I should not start. And but if I have a situation where I cannot even imagine that this is not working, well then go for it. And that’s what I did. I mean, I had tons of ideas, but many were kind of weak or not really well thought out. And it didn’t resonate enough for me to say, yeah, this is what I want to do. For instance, the counter to it as a company, I’m we’re just starting, I mean, my wife and myself. And when I thought through things, I mean, I’m now you know, much older, and I couldn’t come up with a single reason why this is not flying. And I thought, okay, it’s just one of those again, we give it a shot. And I mean, basically, one year into it, from the first idea, let alone from you know, doing first things totally excited.
Shawn Flynn 16:52
Now, of these companies that you started, from my understanding, three out of four of them, you co-founded them with your wife, and I, I mean, I’ve talked to many venture capitalists that maybe not publicly but at least over drinks or dinner will say, you know, they don’t want to invest in husband and wife or partner companies. But you broke the norm. Can you tell us about that?
Axel Schultze 17:16
It was breaking the norm. And Funny enough, it’s even breaking my own norm. And I would be very, very cautious investing in a in a husband and wife kind of startup because usually, or not usually. But oftentimes, it’s just not working. I mean, there’s too much conflict and potential conflicts and so on. But in our particular case, I mean, we came both from an entrepreneurial family. And we both know that if there’s time, we do the craziest things in the world. And if not, then we simply don’t we work our butt off, you know, whatever it takes. We had sort of the same experience in that regard. We’re also the same type of people. We don’t have the leadership ego, like, Oh, no, no, it’s my company. Nerds. I mean, without me, you could never do that. I mean, all this kind of stuff never happened. And so we know it’s working. On the pro side. I mean, we’re working like 12 hours, 14 hours a day, every day, or 14 hours together. There’s never the moment. Are you coming home? dinner’s ready. You know, the kids are waiting, I mean, all these things. And this makes a huge difference. So if the couple is good, I mean, if it’s a real good relationship, I think it will work. And if not, it will break. I mean, and so we said, okay, let’s give it a shot works brilliantly, I would not even consider doing it without her. Because there’s so many things that I couldn’t do alone. I mean, I have a sparring partner who goes deeper in your mind and you yourself and stuff like that. So that’s a good thing.
Shawn Flynn 18:57
Could I actually ask a little bit deeper that how does that how is the work dynamics when the company is very small? When the bosses are together? How does that dynamic look for the company as a whole? I started off and as it grows,
Axel Schultze 19:13
an employee is like, okay, is this really good? And you know, who is the real boss? The question, they try to navigate pretty quickly. And it’s interesting. I mean, this is something we experienced, I have to say over almost all the companies after a while, either they never realized that we were together, but in those cases where they did, they realize, okay, everybody, every of these two guys have a very particular strength and very particular weaknesses, and they seem to augment this of each other. And when additional co-founders come to play, which always happened as well, kind of similar, but they realized very quickly No, this is actually a well-done couple and you know, we don’t argue with each other I mean, we, we discuss things I mean, everybody has their opinion. But it’s not like, it works after a while. So I think there’s a certain moment in the beginning where it might be a little bit weird for new employees. But once they get over it, or once they heard, it’s actually cool, no problem at all.
Shawn Flynn 20:22
And now, after all these companies, you’re really excited about how the human mind works and how ideation and learning is done. what triggers you to even think about it? And what have you discovered in your research thus far?
Axel Schultze 20:36
trigger was really some main these people who asked me how did you come up with these ideas? And I had no answer. I mean, I had the generic answer, you know, you need to be open minded. And you need to think out of the box, grab the stars, and I mean, all these things that we hear more or less every day and every time, the thing is that when somebody wants sort of a recipe, so what do I do physically, to do this, or that? And then I realized, so if somebody says, how do you hold a very thin glass, I could explain, grab it. But be very careful that you don’t break it, you sense it with your fingers. And so I could explain even a difficult process. But I cannot, or nobody could or cannot explain in your neurons up there. You know, you tell some of your neurons, you know, you look in the further backside of your pins for the cells. And maybe they can find something, it is very difficult, because the brain obviously, is the only organ and the only mechanic that we have it we’re not controlling like anything else. You can control every muscle. I mean, I learned from my son, a single muscle can be trained, which I thought this is crazy in itself, with a brain is this more difficult. And I started to learn about neuroscience, and how one branch of the neuroscience is actually working on thinking and learning, and not so much about ideation. But I learned and later on ideation learning, it’s almost the same process in our brain, for me was just, I mean, a fully completely new, fascinating world. I mean, it’s like, I know, people who never were diving or never skydiving, or never in the universe, so to speak. I mean, flying to the moon, I mean, these experiences, for me was like, having the experience with my own mind or learning how this works. A couple of discoveries was number one, which was, I think, fascinating. And I argued for a while that humans are not actually literally creative, recomposing ideas from past experiences. So if you see a particular animal, let’s say, a tiger, a frog, you can imagine taking the frog Legs to the tiger and you have a tiger with frog legs. So that’s the degree of composition, that if you take something else that you have never seen or never experienced, you cannot assemble it, because our mind cannot comprehend the unknown. And that is the best proof that our mind is actually not able to create anything, but compose almost everything possible. And so if we think about composition of our past experience this, the interesting thing was, and this was familiar, for me actually the most stunning discovery, if we have all the ideas that we have, based on previous experiences, and there’s nothing and absolutely nothing coming in randomly or divine or anywhere. And then the saying, if you can think it, you can make it is absolutely real. And there is 100% real proof, because everything we think we can pose from past experiences. And so if we have past experiences about whatever is even real. And if you put two real things together, it might be something else. But it’s possible to do that. If we think we could do XYZ and ABC, and if we could become a manager, or if we could become an entrepreneur, or a musician or you know, whatever it is, it is actually possible, because our mind would not be able to compose the idea. If it’s not something that that is actually realistic, I realized that if you can think it, you can make it it’s actually no longer just a motivational sentence. You know, give it to me. But it is something possible because the way our neurons and our whole brain is structured. And so this drove me obviously to the max I have to say, now I wanted to find out what stimulates these neurons to have these compositions. When do they have it? How do they have it? What actually communicates in your mind to make this all work out, we learned, for instance, I mean of almost all of us that we have a right brain half and a left-brain half. One is the creative part, and one is the logical part. And the question for me was, okay, but how does this communicate? And do you know, there’s a mechanism in our brain is called corpus callosum, these are 200 million neurons, that are fibers or axons that connect one brain half with the other. And that is sort of the negotiation paths for experiences, that allows us to create an idea. Another thing is interesting that the brain is our most energy consuming organ, I mean, it’s there’s nothing more energy consuming than the brain, no muscle, no muscle construct nothing. So what he does to protect itself too, from overheating or over the getting overly excited, will make slower than it actually shuts down the process when it’s too much. And that means, you know, you cannot sit for eight hours brainstorming, I mean, you get fully exhausted, he probably fell asleep after five hours. So four hours, you can’t even keep yourself awake. And the brain stops certain activities, when it’s too much of associations and findings and search and so on. We’re studying things and learning heavily, you know, the word my brain explodes, is very, very real. I mean, it seems to be exploding and you get simply super tired. Um, you know, cannot blow the fuse, so to speak, but because they’re inside, I mean, now for entrepreneurs. Now, we know that there is actually a way to come to deeper ideas. And so one of the things we found was that the classic brainstorming, where we sit together a team usually no longer than an hour, and we come up with ideas, and everybody else comes up with ideas, that 50% of who’s in this room or meeting and actually create new ideas based on the inspiration of others. But since the brain has not the capacity to go very deep immediately, because the brain is trained for the last What is it two and a half billion years, every day, and its alert, sees danger, reacts immediately, and reacts to the most obvious solution. And this is what it does still today. It looks for the most obvious solution. And it’s what it does in a brainstorm meeting. So therefore, the brainstorm meeting cannot come up with groundbreaking ideas fundamentally different. It comes up with the most obvious answers, and many of them are no for all the participants. And so everybody gets gung-ho and excited say, hey, yeah, this was a great meeting all these great ideas. And I think this is wonderful. But it’s not innovative, and definitely not disruptive. So what the brain needs is time. And there’s another interesting discovery, and we check this with when a team’s going to be asked. So how many did come to new ideas? One or two days after the brainstorm meeting was over? Every group said, Oh, yeah, there’s always a couple. And I said, Yeah, come on. I mean, if we would listen to all these, I mean, we would never be finished, we would never be done. No new idea. So we have selected the idea that go with it. Now the sad part is, these new ideas become because the brain continues to work on the question. And so it gets actually deeper. So these new ideas would actually be more valuable than the previous ones. I was startups without knowing this, including myself. I mean, we were listening to all these other things. Maybe this is something to polish, and we’re back to the dubare paradigm, and we polish it in even take six months, or three months or two months to polish it to the perfection. And if you don’t do that, your idea will never be really, I mean, mind boggling, it will be still a standard idea. And if we now we realize that the brain has another functionality, it’s called analogous modeling or analogous thinking. So it looks for analogies, similar things, but from very different areas. We learned this actually in the 90 1900s around when we begin to look at how animals fly. And then we thought, okay, if the birds fly that way, maybe we should build the wings of the airplanes like that. And so we do this more and more often. And we know this is very powerful. But interesting enough, we look for the nature of this was a good pattern. So we all look for nature. But what if you did not do chill today, I mean, now we do this, we look not only in nature, but actually other ideas and put analogous ideas together. And this allows the brain to go even deeper. Obviously, it needs more and more ideas, you know, fruit thought before. And then there’s a third element to be called calibers. This is the actually the typical cut sort of Silicon Valley behavior, what would be ideal? Think about there is no not, there’s all the money you can take. You have all the resources you want, what would you do with it. And that stimulates, if the brain is already super active on a topic, it comes up with crazy ideas beyond the normal, because you’re all trained to not be a dreamer, come on, be real, you’re a man, you are adult now, you know, stop playing. Every day, we heard this until you’re truly adults, and no more dream, it’s got too real. And so we need to break this a little bit. And we call this Columburs because this is the ultimate negotiation on the corpus callosum between the two brain halves. And even if the idea is almost perfect, now I want to drive it to the basically to the infinite maximum, that discovery basically was for us. I can only tell you this is a major breakthrough. And even in our own mind, I mean, gosh, I mean, you know, we did some of these, but what could we have done even more? previous businesses? If we had no one every of these aspects? Oh, yeah, long answer, sorry. But it was too fast. To not share it.
Shawn Flynn 31:24
So one of the things he had mentioned, which I thought was fascinating was seems like brainstorming in a corporate setting, you don’t come up with billion-dollar ideas. But in the startup system, you do, can you dive a little bit deeper into this and maybe give recommendations or suggestions.
Axel Schultze 31:42
the ideation process is sort of a very limited timeframe. And this has to do with our entire, I mean, how we get raised, how we get educated, you know, what we learn on the university and so on, completely, as humans conditioned, almost more than trained the 8020 rules to get the job done. Don’t take too much time, don’t get crazy, don’t be, you know, to get excited, and so on and so on. A corporate Innovation Lab, for instance, and actually, I talked to one just two hours ago. So the brainstorm meeting over ideas selected, and then you go with it, period, no discussion. So this corporate and the startup is different. Great idea. Is it really, is this the best we can do now? Probably not? Well, let’s shape it. And so the ideation process in a startup takes on average, probably, I would say, four weeks, six weeks, maybe eight weeks, the founder, I mean, the one who had the original idea, and I can just relate to it myself. I thought always, you know, yeah, this is my idea. And then we published it a bit. But in retrospect, I realized that, if this would be it, it would be just yet another ordinary startup, but not these amazing companies that do things that are unexpected for the rest of the world. Because they’re, you know, the idea, maybe we built a new keyboard, but then the keyboard, I mean, we all use it, and we’re okay with it. And oftentimes, you’ll miss type, and so on, what would be the ideal keyboard would be probably, if I had my attention, I would already get digitized, and the keyboard would put the right keys under my fingers. And then the next guy would say, but come on, if the intention is already sort of digitized, we don’t need a keyboard, we actually, you know, feed the system. And if we would work long enough on this new keyboard, we probably would eliminate the keyboard have the same, still the same experience of keying something in, but he would digitize it. And this is the result of polishing and changing and modifying it again and again and again. And there’s only a few people who, number one, allow this to be happening. And then there’s even if this isn’t Okay, then there’s still a few only a few people that wanted to do that way. As people got so restless. Come on, it is enough get led and get it done and get over it. And let’s move forward and do something we need to work is one of the other behaviors. I mean, we learn you’re successful when you hard working. Always if people come to me, they know you will never be successful. If you’re hard working in the valley, we know that you know work smart and not hard. But that is actually a very fundamental sentence that hasn’t been populated or propagated in the world. These two organizations work mainly on the whole concept of a new solution in a very different way. rushing the professional, don’t dream. Take your time, even though you don’t have any stopping professional but being a dreamer. You know, dream it to the nth degree. And we do this in the in the program as well. And we say, okay, the best thing you can achieve is actually a solution that is impossible to build. Now everybody would say, are you crazy? are you wasting my time in pause? If you know it’s impossible to build, why even go there? But if you would ask Elon Musk, when he thought about what he’s building, would he stop when it’s impossible to build, while the company would never be at the point where this today, because it’s impossible to build an autonomous car electric and everything he kind of dreamed about 10 years ago from today, it wasn’t even a CPU and AI system that could build an autonomous car. He knew it’s happening one day. And when I started with C 2000. I mean, I know it’s happening, that the people will take this as the best possible model for distributions. And when we started the roads, it was for me, it was clearly people would one day understand. And there were a couple things that we couldn’t even do back then. But I know if we work for the next five to 10 years, we’ll have the list solution for doing things. The same as with what we’re doing right now. There’s a whole list of things that is impossible today. I mean, we cannot select the best possible innovative idea today. Because you know, innovation, and even the best AI system in the world, I mean, even the Google AlphaGo team wouldn’t be able to write code that goes into the internet to verify that this is the best possible idea. Because if it would, then it would be a bad idea, because it already exists. And if it doesn’t exist, it can only say, well, this idea doesn’t exist. But whether it’s good or not, you know, somebody else need to do that. And I just listened to one guy talking about AI and said, You know, one of the interesting things is about the human mind, you need to train an AI system with about 100,000 to one or even 10 million objects, whatever it is pictures, phrases, content of any kind, until the AI system is trained well enough to identify a dog right away, whether it’s a dog in the grass, whether it’s a dog amongst cheap, whether it’s a dog in the space, and whatever it is, the AI system would after about a million images, it would recognize this as a dog. Now, if you give it to, let’s say you have a grad a daughter, or you know everybody to lift the three-year-old in your family, and you take a little book and say, Look, this is a dog. What is this dog? No, no, this is a cat. And you go on and on within five to 10 tries, a three-year-old knows what a dog is five versus a million. So there’s something that goes on in our technology up here. And the brain tells us very, very quickly associations that our AI systems, even the best in the world cannot do. And this is when we also realize, okay, this is a groundbreaking innovation, even though the system or the product doesn’t even exist. But the concept alone helps us to associate this with something Wow. No III system in the world could do that. But one day, I believe we will be able to also digitize this. Oh, I have absolutely no clue.
Shawn Flynn 38:29
That’s amazing. I mean, I’m just thinking to myself, I’m smarter than the smartest AI machine there. I can’t wait to tell the PhD from Stanford that’s got a desk down the hall this. But another question for you. I mean, you have this TEDx talk, where you give an example of a platypus and Alexa, show to show imagination. Can you tell us about the results of this talk?
Axel Schultze 38:52
It is an interesting result, because some people still don’t believe that we are not creative. And so it was actually a test where I said, Okay, imagine for a moment, you’re the most creative person in the world. And so some people would say, you know, I’m not and other people. Yeah, that would be cool. Now create something a new creative. Anything, it doesn’t matter that you have the entire free room of the universe. Create something by taking a platypus and Alexis. There’s some people who then come up and say, Okay, excellent. I can imagine a million things around the bloody purse because I know it’s a little animal. It’s very rare. It has a there’s a mouth like a dog actually swims underwater and so on. But Alexi crypt I don’t know. I mean, and I was, you know, looking at my mobile phone what it is couldn’t find it. You have to explain Lexi crypt as it is. No. I mean, if you’re creative, you know, just take anything. And people realized and it’s the back experiences that composes new creative ideas. And if you have one platypus a little animal, then yes, animal. But Lexi crypt still or No, you cannot connect these tools. And so this is sort of my way of testing that every creative idea ever created comes out of past experiences. And if you look at the neurons and these kind of end capsules of the so-called organelles, these are the things where stuff is stored. It’s just chemical stuff, mechanics to basically analyze the chemical content. And if it’s not an experience, meaning it’s not there, also our neurons, even if we have 86 billion of them, cannot create anything. No, a platypus is, most people don’t even know and don’t even I mean, it’s a very rare animal. They don’t know what a platypus is, is some do. Alexi crypt is not existing, it was a made-up word. If he was, ah, see, this is creative as it No, it’s L. It’s an E It’s an X is nothing but composing a new word. Lexi crypt, but its still letters is still a word. And the only thing that’s missing is the association with something real.
Shawn Flynn 41:12
And now you’re on your fifth company. What’s the goals for that? I mean, you’ve accomplished so much over your career. What do you want to do with this one company? What do you want to solve?
Axel Schultze 41:23
the problem that we’re trying to solve is a little bit twofold. But it’s one focus is we want to basically realize our findings, that almost everybody is creative. Innovation, meaning groundbreaking innovation, not just improvement, is actually possible, quote, unquote, on demand. So if somebody says, Well, we need innovation, or an innovative idea around this, or that customers are unhappy across the board, we know that we’ll somebody accidentally coming up with this idea. But if you don’t want to wait until our competition comes up, we want to solve it. But we don’t have this idea. And if you’re not trained for having an idea, and you cannot do it, you have to wait for the accidental I they are and if we look into the number of startups that are even more or less successful, and we divide this to the by the number of populations 7.5 billion, and you come to an interesting number 0.007 entrepreneurs today, of the entire population. So entrepreneurs are extremely rare. They’re liking it’s not energy. It’s not telic intellect. It’s not I mean, none of these things. They’re all lacking. I’m very active on Quora. For instance, again, these questions I’m, I’m a 26-year-old, I’m 28. I’m 14, I’m 40, whatever, I want to build my own business, but I don’t have idea who can help me. So they’re lacking ideas, and they lacking the ability to look at something and say this is a problem. And they see that they don’t know how to solve it. And so how would How cool would it be? If those people say I see this problem of water or, you know, new clothes, or building new homes or reducing energy, or I mean, whatever it is, we have millions of problems. Is it okay, I’ll cover this one, I’ll take this, you know, this mechanism, and come up with the idea, and I’m an entrepreneurial spirit, so I want to build it, and then I simply go and execute. But if you don’t have these magical billion deer, it’s very difficult. I mean, the starting point, it’s difficult to help and I know when we did sort of our, our math, I mean, they’re about 250 million companies out there who would need some more a better innovation. And so that’s basically our quote unquote, primary audience. I hate the word target audience like gosh shooting.
Shawn Flynn 44:11
And with that, xo if anyone wants to find out more information about what you’re doing, what’s the best way to get more information?
Axel Schultze 44:18
Well, people would find me probably on LinkedIn, my name is Axel Schultz. And on bluecallom.com, our website blue light blue and then callom.com. That’s probably the best way to reach out anytime.
Shawn Flynn 44:32
Fantastic. And I want to thank George Parrish. One more time for making this introduction that allowed today’s episode to happen. And for our audience, please like, subscribe and send to your network. It encourages us to create great content like this in the future. And once again, Axel, I want to thank you for your time day on the Silicon Valley podcast.
Axel Schultze 44:50
Thank you, Shawn. It was really amazing. Thank you a lot.
Announcer 44:58
Thank you for listening to the Silicon Valley podcast. To access our resources, visit us at the siliconvalleypodcast.com and follow our host on Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn at Shawn Flynn SV. This show is for entertainment purposes only. Before making any decisions, consult a professional.
