Rodolfo Saccoman

Google's former CEO Eric Schmidt on the data strategy behind the next hundred billion dollar companies: He explains that he evaluates startup ideas by looking at 5-year growth trajectories and asking whether there's a more scalable strategy available. Take a founder building an app they want to charge $10 for. @ericschmidt's challenge: "Why not give it away for free and upsell users instead?" But the real insight is his framework for predicting which companies will dominate — and it all comes down to data. "5 years ago, I said publicly that the future will be apps that are on smartphones that use Google Maps, GPS, and do something useful. Now, what I should have said was Uber." So what does he think will define the next wave of massive companies? Systems built on Android and iOS, fast networks, and powerful machine learning, with a crucial data advantage: "They're going to use the crowd to learn something." He illustrates with this example: Pay dermatologists $1 each to categorize skin samples. Feed that into a machine learning system. Then sell the diagnostic service back to them, because a system trained on thousands of experts will outperform any individual. Schmidt summarizes the winning data strategy: "You crowdsource information in, you learn it, and then you sell it. [This] is in my view a highly likely candidate for the next hundred billion dollar corporations." The blueprint: Aggregate expert data at scale → train ML systems on that data → sell superior insights back to the market. This is how the next generation of dominant companies will be built.

ELON: MOVE SKILLS BETWEEN WORLDS AND YOU BECOME SUPERMAN Elon says the real advantage comes from solving problems across completely different arenas. When knowledge crosses fields, difficulty collapses. What feels ordinary in one industry becomes overwhelming leverage in another. That cross-pollination, he argues, is where outsized breakthroughs come from. “I’ve had to solve a lot of problems in a lot of different arenas, which you get this cross-fertilization of knowledge, of problem solving. And if you problem solve in a lot of different arenas, what is trivial in one arena is a superpower in another arena. It’s sort of like Planet Krypton. You came from Planet Krypton type of thing. On Planet Krypton you’d just be normal, but if you come to Earth, you’re a Superman. So if you take manufacturing at volume, manufacturing complex objects in the automotive industry, I’ve had to work on solving that. When translated to the space industry, it’s like being Superman, because rockets are made in very small numbers. If you apply automotive manufacturing technology to satellites and rockets, it’s like being Superman." Source: @PeterDiamandis