Give Society What It Doesn't Know How to Get

You're not going to get rich renting out your time, but you say that you will get rich by giving society what it wants but does not yet know how to get at scale. That's right. So essentially, I could... We talked about before, money is IOU's from society saying you did something good in the past; now here's something that we owe you for the future.

And so society will pay you for creating things that it wants but society doesn't yet know how to create those things because if it did, it wouldn't need you. They would already be stamped out big time. Almost everything is in your house, and your workplace, and on the street used to be technology at one point in time.

At the time when oil was technology, that made JD Rockefeller rich. There's a time when cars were technology that made Henry Ford rich. So technology is just a set of things, as Alan Kay said, that don't quite work yet. Once something works, it's no longer technology. So society always wants new things.

And if you want to be wealthy, you want to figure out which one of those things you can provide for society that it does not yet know how to get but it will want. That's natural to you and within your skill set, within your capabilities. And then you have to figure out how to scale it because if you just build one of it, that's not enough.

You gotta build thousands, or hundreds of thousands, or millions, or billions of them so everybody can have one. Steve Jobs and his team, of course, figured out that society would want smartphones—computers in their pocket that had all the phone capability times a hundred and be easy to use.

So they figured out how to build that and then they figured out how to scale it, and they figured out how to get one into every first-world citizen's pocket, and eventually every third-world citizen's too. And so because of that, they're handsomely rewarded, and Apple is the most valuable company in the world.

The way I tried to put it was that the entrepreneur's job is to try to bring the high end to the mass market. It starts as high-end first. It starts with an act of creativity first; you created just because you want it. You want it and you know how to build it and you need it, and so you build it for yourself.

Then you figure out how to get it to other people, and then for a little while, which people have it—like for example, rich people had chauffeurs, and then they had black town cars, and then Uber came along, and everyone had a private driver.

It was available to everybody, and now you can even see Uber pools that are replacing shuttle buses because it's more convenient. And then you get scooters, which are even further down market of that. So you're right, it's about distributing what rich people used to have to everybody.

But the entrepreneur's job starts even before that, which is creation. Entrepreneurship is essentially an act of creating something new from scratch, predicting that society will want it, and then figuring out how to scale it and get it to everybody in a profitable way, in a self-sustaining manner.