December 17, 2018

North Star Podcast – Dreams and Determination with Daniel Gross

The North Star Podcast Website 

This is a conversation between host David Perell and guest Daniel Gross on what drives entrepreneurial startups and how to improve oneself to help others

Key Takeaways

• “Invest in yourself, so that you can invest in others”
• Habits are things you do, without having to think about it
  • It gets harder as you get older to acquire newer habits
• Pick smaller steps, write down the version of yourself that doesn’t accomplish goals
  • Use the negative and positive versions to propel yourself
• The advancements of society are attributed to individuals rather than groups
• When you try to predict the future, make sure you look at the past

Introduction

• Daniel Gross is a young entrepreneur who co-founded Cue, which was bought by Apple, where he led the machine learning efforts, until joining Y Combinator as a partner in early 2017
  • Follow him on Twitter and LinkedIn

Life and Video Games

• There are boring and exciting ways to learn
  • School is associated with boredom

Gamification

• Gamification of life – everything in life is in some form of a video game, all humans regardless of IQ, are seeking novelty
  • Videos Games are interesting ways of interpreting the world
    • Equal parts interesting and fun
• Win too much and it’s boring, win too little and it’s too hard
  • Games match you up with people at your level only
  • Life doesn’t 

Motivation

• How can you find the motivation to learn a new skill?
  • Force function – Tell your friends you will do something before a particular date, they won’t care, but you will work really hard to get that goal done, building a force function

Feedback

• If you are doing something and your friends tell you it is bad, that is helpful information
  • Doesn’t matter what the mass thinks of you, but a select few
• Getting the approval of people around us is healthy
  • It becoming a powerful motivating factor

Artificial Intelligence

• AI is brilliant at operations
  • People are waiting around for computers to do human work

Innovation

• Take the current reality and project it forward,
  • You don’t think of Game of Thrones when TV screens are barely coming out
• Analogies are very satisfying to think of
  • It feels good to describe them to others, that way it permeates through society.
  • Feels good to learn and teach others in that way

Individual vs. Group Think

• Groupthink – Wanting to impress the boss
  • You want to increase diverse thinking, not group think
• Computers don’t do “transfer learning” very well (Cross Domain Analogy)
  • AI does not instinctively, like humans, know that a ping pong ball thrown up in the air will come back due to gravity

Three Ways to Help Start-Up Companies

• Hold office hours
  •  Have mentors that can answer difficult questions
• Resources
  • Computing power
• Datasets
  • Working with different companies to offer data sets

Short-Term v Long-Term Learning

• You’ve got to build a plan – A vision where you want to be.
  • Think about the why of your vision too
• Think less about the goal, and more about what would keep you from getting there
• Crystallize the vision
• Reverse engineer your vision into a plan
• Reward yourself after accomplishments 

The Environment Effect

• Cultivate an environment that will help you
  • If you can, environments are like cheat codes
  • If you can surround yourself with builders, you will have a higher chance of becoming a builder
  • The physical environment that you are in, can affect your motivation, effort, and success
• Are the relationships you build online as effective?
  • First Step: Podcasts, books 
  • Second step: find a digital community
  • Third step: Physically locating near them
• Find a city that has a reputation that you want
  • New York whispers money, LA whispers popularity  

Israel’s Environment

• Isreal’s greatness stemmed from having to be great
  • Harshness in Isreal creates hard-working individuals
• Pressure to be great, that doesn’t exist in countries that have plenty
• Scarcity creates the greatest
  • The northern part of the US is more developed than Mexico
• True Bonding, sense of the same enemy (Suffering) (challenges)
• Why places are so different, but so close, the culture of adversity and scarcity, creates solid structure systems, creates degrees of trust,
  • Everyone in Israel goes to the military and the military chooses the best 
  • Check out the book – Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty
    • Will China be next?

American Enthusiasm

• What is about America that makes it exceptional?
  • High degree of optimism about the future, high degrees of trust and bonding
  • Optimism can cause situations similar to the 2008 market crash, too much hype
  • People generally trust you, and assume you will do your job right
• Critical strategic thinking, taking something with no value and making it valuable
  • Great things start small
    • Facebook started off as a small directory at Harvard, Google started as a small project at Stanford