ExO 2.0 Launch Event
In a Nutshell
Exponential Organizations 2.0 (ExOs) are purpose-driven, agile entities leveraging 6Ds of exponentials (digitize, dematerialize, demonetize, democratize, deceive, disrupt) and SCALE (Staff on Demand, Community & Crowd, Algorithms/AI, Leverage Assets, Engagement) plus IDEAS (Interfaces, Dashboards, Experimentation, Autonomy, Social Technologies) to achieve 10x-40x better performance than peers. Core: Start with Massive Transformative Purpose (MTP) like "Transform civilization," build via 12 steps (MTP, community, team, MVP, product-market fit, implement attributes, become platform), foster abundance/exponential/moonshot mindsets, and disrupt linear orgs' immune systems with constant experimentation and AI. Key proof: Top ExOs deliver 40x shareholder returns; unicorns like Uber, Airbnb, GitHub exemplify; buy $9.99 living book with Ray K AI for implementation; join openexo.com/A360 communities.
These notes were generated by AI and may contain inaccuracies.
Humanity and our digital progeny are transforming our lives, our business, and our planet at an exponential rate. What was once science fiction just a few years ago is now science fact, making what was once miraculous now seem routine. What was once the purview of multinationals and heads of state is now child's play and available for free online. Converging exponential technologies are growing and overlapping into tsunami-sized waves that are reinventing industries, rearranging fortunes, and rewriting our future.
Predicting the future is difficult, but prevailing meta-trends offer a glimpse of the exponential road ahead. Top meta-trends impacting humanity, increasing global abundance, and giving birth to the next few trillion-dollar fortunes:
Gigabit Connectivity
Inspiring speed with which we are blanketing the Earth in gigabit connectivity, linking everybody and everything 24 hours per day at ultra-low cost. Billions of people and devices exchanging data, transactions, points of view, music, Google searches over an ever-expanding 5G terrestrial network and thousands of orbiting Starlink satellites. Future of abundant information and connectivity where you can know anything you want anytime you want.
Humanoid Robots and Avatars
Arrival of humanoid robots and avatars fulfilling service jobs that are dull, dangerous, or dirty. Elon Musk on Tesla Bot: "this technology will upend our idea of what the economy is and bring about an age of abundance."
Artificial Intelligence
Pervasive deployment of AI throughout our lives, expectation it will reach human-level intelligence soon. Ray Kurzweil predicts human-level intelligence by 2029. Elon Musk predicts it will grow vastly smarter than any human and overtake us by 2025. This technology is our greatest tool for slaying grand challenges and creating global abundance. Don't blink; the future is faster than you think.
Welcome to the Exponential Organizations 2.0 Mastermind. Next three hours packed; could go three days. Salim Ismail introduces himself: from India originally, Canadian, 10 years in Europe, 20 years in US. Head of innovation at Yahoo where journey starts, founding executive director of Singularity University, wrote Exponential Organizations, now writing and launching second edition with Peter Diamandis, on Peter's board at XPRIZE Foundation.
Peter Diamandis: serial entrepreneur, built companies, universities including International Space University, founding executive chairman of Singularity University with Ray Kurzweil, runs XPRIZE Foundation as executive chairman with CEO Anousheh Ansari. Passion: helping entrepreneurs go big. Extraordinary time in human history. Partnering with Salim on EXO 2.0 to uplift humanity, play the biggest game.
Covering: basis of exponential organizations, characteristics, how to build one. Steps to take MTP into global challenge and transform the world. Book launched this week for $9.99—buy for team, colleagues, friends. Hit #1 on Amazon categories.
Built into a living book with AI you can query. Named AI Ray K after Ray Kurzweil, chancellor of Singularity University, mentor. Free AI to help create exponential organization. Creating global ecosystem around this.
Thanks to EXO Community, Peter’s Abundance 360 Community, NABO Partners, Casper, Global Entrepreneurship Network, Genius Group, Singularity University. Contributors, writers, Lisa Pereira (cat herding 3-4 years), Silicon Valley Press team, Kerrie and team at Igniting Souls. Hello to watch parties in Africa, Europe, Asia, huge one at NSU Leevon Center for Innovation in Fort Lauderdale.
Started at Singularity University one-week executive programs—highest rated educational programs in world. People ask: got disruption, what do I do Monday? Book response to that. Scanned 150-200 biggest unicorns: how scaling so fast? From 2008, organizations scaling at pace never seen before—that's exponential organization (ExO).
First book 2014, now 10 years data. Original top 100 ExOs: half gone IPO or acquired—unbelievable success rate.
Ranked Fortune 100 against model, segment on CNBC Squawk Box. Index of most purpose-driven, flexible, agile, scalable org structures. Tracked top 10 using these most vs. least over 7 years (Chandra Nipal, UBS, real stock market data). Top 10 outperformed bottom 10: almost 3x revenue growth, 6x profitability, 11x return on equity, 40x shareholder returns (CAGR). Ability to adapt drives market value as world more volatile.
Thousands of stories like Genius Group with Roger Hamilton (A360 member): from zero, followed book, went public. Over next decade, every company, nonprofit, impact project, government department structured this way.
New kind of organization. Not what father/grandfather started. Brains (100 billion neurons, 100 trillion synaptic connections) evolved in savannas of Africa hundreds of thousands years ago—local and linear. Now global and exponential world: changing hour to hour, impact a billion lives.
Red line: us, investors, shareholders (linear). Yellow line: exponential technologies (doubling). Disconnect: disruptive stress or opportunity.
Exponential mindset: exponentials not intuitive. 30 linear steps: 30 meters. 30 exponential steps (doubling): billion meters, 26x around planet.
Paper 0.135mm thick, folded 50 times: 13 folds = 1 meter, 20 folds = football field length, 38 folds = around planet, 50 folds = to the Sun (93 million miles).
Exponentials: faster, cheaper computers bedrock for sensors, networks, AI, robotics, 3D printing, synthetic biology, AR/VR, blockchain, quantum. Convergence of 2-4 transforming industries.
Kodak Example
Kodak 1996: $28B market cap, 140k employees. 20 years earlier, Steven Sasson in Kodak Labs invented digital camera—board rejected as toy (0.1 megapixel, black/white), they were paper/chemicals business. Bankrupt decades later. Same year, Instagram (13 employees) acquired by Facebook for $1B (now >$100B valuation). Kodak's MTP: preserving people's memories.
Driven by Moore's Law: Gordon Moore (Intel), first integrated circuit 1958, transistors double every 12-18 months, continued 50 years, 28 billionfold increase last 47 years. Law of Accelerating Returns: computation from mechanical, relay, vacuum tubes, transistors, integrated circuits → 3D computing, photonics, quantum.
6Ds of Exponentials
Digitize → dematerialize (zeros/ones) → demonetize (replicate cost ~zero) → democratize (transmit globally ~zero cost). Early growth deceptive (first digital camera 0.1MP → 0.2 → 0.4), but 20 doublings = millionfold, 30 = billionfold, disrupts.
Radio Shack devices now apps on phone: dematerialized, demonetized.
Asteroid impact analogy: 65 million years ago, 10km asteroid killed large slow dinosaurs; agile furry mammals survived → us. Exponential tech = asteroid; agility key.
30 linear steps easy to gauge; 30 doublings (billion, 26x world) hard. If car speed increased like Moore's Law: faster than light.
Classic organizations: military top-down hierarchical command/control. Good for scarcity, short-term, stable markets. Innovation inside-out, risk intolerant, slow. KPIs, performance reviews mistrust employees. From Industrial Revolution.
Coase's Law (Ronald Coase, 1930s 9-page Nobel paper): large orgs exist because internal transaction costs < external → big corps efficient.
Challenge: big companies have immune system (Jeff Kowalski, Autodesk CTO): antibodies attack disruption.
50 rationales for no change: "it just can't be done," "we don't have the money," "nobody else has done it," "we've tried 60 times," "beyond my responsibility," "not my job," "I don't like it," "not our problem," "needs committee," "competition won't like."
Worse in government (regulation/policy immune system), public sector (taxis vs. Uber, bankers vs. Bitcoin).
Julie Hannah: EXO insight on immune system revelation like Innovator's Dilemma. Invisible hand undermining innovation. EXO methodology transforms immune system, unlocks superpowers, concise/elegant accelerator. Every org has this, benefits from methodology.
Big companies optimized for predictability/efficiency (e.g., McDonald's same Big Mac worldwide, linear supply chains). Designed for linear/incremental/static environments—not today's world.
Immune systems even in 10-100 person orgs post-success.
Marriott Example
Marriott today ~$50B. If launched Airbnb/TripAdvisor/Booking.com: ~$250B (5x). Ideas inside Marriott, immune system blocked—fear cannibalizing $50B, leaving $200B on table. True for most big companies.
David Rose (Godfather of Angel Investing): "any company designed for success in 20th century doomed to failure in 21st."
No MBA program teaches building Uber—all teach 20th-century orgs. Massive update needed in education.
When building Singularity University, the dean of a top business school visited. After explaining the vision, he asked how big the team was. There were five people at the table, and his mind broke; he left mentally. Five minutes later, he suggested going outside to play Frisbee. This highlighted a fundamental change since around 2008, starting with Amazon Web Services launch, allowing computing to be taken off the balance sheet as a truly variable cost.
For entrepreneurs starting fresh, there's a playbook to build an EXO. The challenge is for multi-thousand-person organizations with ingrained biases and experts who resist change, as it threatens their expertise. The expert is the guy who can tell you how not to do something exactly how it can't be done. The day before a breakthrough, it's a crazy idea. Large organizations need a crazy idea department for breakthroughs; without it, they're stuck in incremental, linear growth, effectively moving backwards.
In Abundance 360 community of CEOs, the focus is helping them understand that crazy is where you begin, in the context of massive transformative purpose (MTP) and taking moonshots.
Exponential organizations (EXOs) were derived by analyzing unicorns; nothing was invented, just patterns tagged and harvested into a model. Definition: A purpose-driven, agile, scalable organization that uses accelerating technologies in the 6Ds (dematerialize, demonetize, democratize, etc.) resulting in 10x better performance than non-EXO peers. In Fortune 100, saw 40x, but 10x is the benchmark.
To switch from a trusted brand, needs at least 10x improvement; 10% better gets ignored. A combustion engine car has 2,000 moving parts in its drivetrain; Tesla has 17—streetlights ahead in maintenance, design, cost, reliability.
Examples: Figma from zero to $20 billion market cap in seven years; Mercado Libre, top stock performer in Argentina; ChatGPT exploding at light speed.
TED: Chris Anderson took a 1,000-person conference, established MTP ideas worth spreading, put talks on YouTube (rich media), allowed anyone in TED community to create TEDx events. Created a global media brand at near-zero cost.
Guazi (Chinese used car company): Gathers 250 data points (audio, video), uses ML on engine audio for quality, real-time pricing. Offers seller 10% less than real value in cash now; buyer 10% more. Transparent pricing cuts middlemen. In 7 years, captured 80% of China's used car market, sells 2 million cars/month—from zero in a physical, fragmented industry.
Web3 NFT projects like Bored Ape Yacht Club (board ape) went from zero to $1 billion market cap in under a year.
With EXOs operating at this speed, Coase's law is obsolete—transaction costs are lower outside than inside. Small environments avoid immune systems (legal, branding, HR, privacy).
Example at Yahoo (head of innovation): Launching a feature on Yahoo Personals took 8 months (systems testing, integration, brand, security, privacy). MySpace similar. Zuckerberg at Facebook gave developers autonomy: if code ready, deploy live or get fired if it takes down the site. Rolled out features weekly, blew past Yahoo, MySpace, Google.
EXO model (by Yuri van Geest, Salim Ismail, Mike Malone): Brain diagram with MTP, five externalities, five internal mechanisms.
MTP is first and most important: Massive, inspires you/team (pride), emotional energy (awe/excitement or pain), commit a decade (overnight successes take 11 years), gives focus/target, authentic from heart/soul (shout from mountaintops), brief/easy to remember/recite (team/community knows it).
Formula: Actions + group served.
Examples:
- Google: Organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful.
- SpaceX: Revolutionize space technology with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets.
- XPRIZE: Incentivize and accelerate radical breakthroughs towards an equitable and abundant future for humanity.
- Singularity University: Support entrepreneurs to positively impact the lives of 1 billion+ people.
- TED: Ideas worth spreading.
- Abundance 360/XPRIZE: Inspire and guide entrepreneurs to create a hopeful and abundant future for humanity.
- Salim's: Transform civilization (from dad's wisdom: materialized world, now civilize it; transcend tribal thinking).
Benefits of MTP:
- Power of pull: Forms community (people want involvement, seek significance beyond dollars).
- Attracts/retains talent for 10-year mission.
- Shifts focus from internal politics to external impact (big companies: 99% internal talk; MTP forces outward).
- Focus in abundance of opportunities/deals/startups/investments.
- Sets up for moonshots (MTP as canvas).
Peter Diamandis' early MTP: Irreversibly and privately open the space frontier to make humanity multi-planet species.
- Moonshot 1: Build International Space University (decade with Todd Hawley, Bob Richards; now leading institution in Strasbourg, France).
- Moonshot 2: First XPRIZE ($10M for private human spaceflight; launched revolution).
Moonshots: Specific projects with targets/dates on MTP canvas.
Tool: moonshotplanner.com (free AI by Steve Brown; generative AI for MTP/moonshot brainstorming/planning).
Every unicorn had an MTP (spiritual/fundamental problem; decade/25-year commitment per Dan Sullivan). What wakes you at 6am to solve? Billion-dollar problem? Childhood passion (viable now).
EXOs build business models around abundance (vs. 10,000 years of scarcity): Uber (empty cars), Airbnb (extra bedrooms).
Brain diagram: Right side five externalities (SCALE) for small footprint, fast scaling.
Poster child: Uber. Minimize employees; use independent contractors/platforms.
Pandemic: Marriott laid off 50% of 45,000 staff across thousands of properties (nightmare). Airbnb (hosts independent) laid off 2,000, minimal disruption. Top 10 vs. bottom 10 Fortune 100: Top 10 did 5x better due to flexibility.
Platforms: Amazon Mechanical Turk (task farming), TaskRabbit, Gigwalk, Fiverr. MBO Partners manages contractors (on/offboarding, training, checks) for big companies; shift from 3-4% to 30% contractors for resilience. 2005-2015: 94% new US jobs in gig economy. Reed Hoffman: The Startup of You—everyone as independent contractor.
8 billion people, gigabit connections (5G, Starlink). Build community for ideas, customers, quality checking.
Layers:
- Core team (founders, employees, personal network).
- Community: Customers, alumni (direct relationship).
- Vendors, fans, partners (direct, one step removed).
- Staff on demand.
- Crowd (everyone else).
Build vibrant community first (e.g., current EXO/Abundance 360/Singularity communities).
Examples:
- TED: Stage participants core; audience/video sharers community.
- XPRIZE (29 years): Grand challenges (e.g., $100M Elon Musk gigaton carbon removal; detect/put out wildfire in 10 min—Palmer Luckey/Oculus founder first team). Builds teams, fans, funders.
- Wikipedia.
- Xiaomi (2nd largest China phone co.): No PR/product dev/marketing costs. 1,000 super users vote features, get early phones for boasting/word-of-mouth.
Community uses: Marketing, product dev, training, hiring. Huge arbitrage—biggest companies terrible at it.
Next after community/crowd: algorithms, AI
AI algorithms are the most dominant thing happening in the world today. It's the most exciting, and the most important advice is to go and play with it. Kevin Kelly, founding editor of Wired, said: > "the next 10,000 business plans will be for an entrepreneur to take a domain and add AI to it."
This happened 100 years ago with electricity added to the mechanical drill, washer, or dishwasher. It's happening again.
Why AI is Exploding Now
The idea of AI began at a Dartmouth conference in 1956, 67 years ago. Four reasons:
- Computational power: 50+ years of Moore's Law not slowing down. In the last 5 years, tipping point in enough power to run neural networks and deep learning networks.
- Structured data: Large language models trained on all data produced, doubling year on year—every tweet, Facebook post, everything online. Data allows models to learn and anticipate what is next.
- Efficient algorithms: Over last 5 years, price of training an AI algorithm down 99.5%.
- Massive capital: Investments accelerating.
These four attributes drive better and better AI.
Sundar Pichai: "AI could have more profound implications for humanity than electricity or fire."
Elon Musk: "Companies are going to race to build AI or you'll be made uncompetitive. Potentially if your competitor is racing to build AI they will crush you."
There will be two kinds of companies at the end of this decade: those fully utilizing AI and those out of business.
Tsunami of Data and Chief AI Officer
Living in a tsunami of data: autonomous cars with LiDAR and imaging, trillion sensor economy where you can know anything anytime. A competitor harnessing data, creating algorithms, and getting insights is way ahead.
Recommendation: Appoint a Chief AI Officer—strategic advisor to the CEO who understands the field, sees directions, and advises. Not someone coding large language models.
Video from Emad Mustak, CEO of Stability AI:
Creative industry: video games $180 billion/year, Disney spends $10 billion/year, Amazon $16 billion/year on content. All changing in next couple years from one 2 GB file.
It's about information theory. Once you train a generalist system with human input to understand principles, you drop just about everything.
Advice to 20-year-old: Drop everything, focus entirely. $100 billion in next few years, then a trillion dollars into this sector because it's transformative and few understand it. Never been a technological advance that will diffuse this fast.
To focus as entrepreneur: Be an entrepreneur in this. If you communicate well, communicate this and get paid $1 million/year as consultant. If artist/creative, become most efficient artist. Corporations outcompeted by individuals and small groups building on this technology.
Starting point of ExOs was Amazon Web Services (AWS) to leverage computing power.
Hundreds of types: sharing economy, outsourcing, leveraging cars (Getaround, Turo), Rent the Runway, opening datasets, fractional ownership of IP and real estate.
Either leverage others' assets or make yours available to become a platform.
Explosive example: Uber leveraged GPS on phones vs. Nokia buying Navteq (traffic circle sensors, roadways)—doesn't scale.
LabCentral: Biotech lab facilities rented by lab bench. Biotech startup gets all equipment, approvals.
Mark Hatch created TechShop lab spaces and Fab Labs worldwide. Squishy Robotics (multi-billion dollar company) built at Fab Lab—no upfront equipment investment.
Engagement: Engage crowd to make community, keep it sticky.
- Incentive prizes: Turn crowd into community (e.g., XPRIZE). Connect with MTP, form teams.
- Gamification: Makes it sticky.
- Token economics: MicroStrategy Lightning Rewards (Michael Saylor)—employees get satoshis wallet for good behavior (on time to meeting, watch training video).
Video from Eric Pulier, CEO of Vatom:
Confluence of exponential technologies transforms engagement with internal/external constituents.
Pepsi World Cup Qatar: Printed 200 million QR codes on potato chip bags. Scan → Web3 wallet, drop smart NFT for engagement (share selfie → face in massive soccer ball). Result: hundreds of thousands gave first-party data, ongoing communication.
State Farm: 1 million digital footballs in AR across US. Chase for prizes—redeemables, collectibles turned NFTs, first-party data for long-term relationships.
Octalysis Platform
Yukai Chou (PhD Berkeley in gamification) created Octalysis framework: 8 major human motivations (4 positive white hat: empowerment, epic meaning, ownership; 4 negative: FOMO, unpredictability, avoidance). Mapped 150+ game dynamics (leaderboards, progress bars, Easter eggs) to motivations.
Prescriptive model for human engagement to embed in any product/service.
ExOs will build using this. Blockchains exploded with community + cryptoeconomics + this model to $10 trillion market cap (most world unaware).
Duolingo embedded it. Gary Vaynerchuk's VeeFriends created community trading NFTs. Web3 uses aggressively.
Future of brands: MTP for purpose, Octalysis engagement, NFT architecture backend (permanent programmable cookie, direct customer relationship bypassing Web2 gatekeepers).
2015: Paul Polman (Unilever CEO) had speaker address top 200 execs, ordered every brand take MTP. 4.5 years later, 5 most profitable Unilever brands adopted it most.
Peter Bailey: Where/how do micro/SMEs find space in ExO paradigm?
Smaller the better—they adapt naturally. Biggest companies (Apple, Facebook, Microsoft, Google) started small, adopted characteristics. Mercado Libre (Argentina). Biggest companies next decade are ExOs. Small companies more effective—no immune system, flexible, risk-tolerant vs. large companies unlearning 50 years Harvard MBA thinking.
Arvin: How protect downside building ExOs?
Small resource footprint, staff on demand, leverage assets → low risk, less capital at risk. Cost to start tech company: 20 years ago $5 million (servers, software, landlines, bandwidth); now $500. Generative AI ExOs started with zero capital (evenings/weekends)—everything free.
Intern Andre: Built 3 generative AI startups.
Lucas: Less financial capability—team with investors or test small/bootstrap?
100% bias: Test small, bootstrap. De-risk more, create more value, less dilution. Investors make you risk-averse, less agile (data shows truth, not passion).
Had an amazing team passionate with a vision in MTP but what they exactly did shifted as they learned more and more. Sometimes your investors will be a lead keel and an anchor. If you're bringing investors, make sure that they're backing you in particular not your idea. There are three kinds of market things: technology risk, market risk, and execution risk. Investors look at those three. Today almost everything comes down to team risk—how cohesive is the team when you inevitably go through the pivots and right turns to navigate success. Investors are typically betting on that. The more you can make those right-hand turns and find your sweet spot, the ideally you get to product-market fit before doing that. We'll talk more about this when we talk about building an EXO.
Michelle Mick Lee: Do you see a need for a change of the social contract between workers and organizations?
Yeah 100%. From 2005 to 2015, 94% of new jobs in the US were in the gig economy. This totally breaks pension planning, unemployment benefits, retirement plans, all of that, healthcare benefits, etc. You need platforms like MBO Partners that will handle some of that for you and handle that social contract so you can focus on just the gig economy. When you have a platform like that or Fiverr or Upwork, it allows you to focus on the work that you love doing the most. Most people in the gig economy are doing that work because they really want to.
Funny story about Uber: A few years ago one of our alumni in France said, "Hey can I talk to you? I've got a meeting with the Finance Minister in France, I'd love your help." What's the meeting about? "He wants to know how to shut down Uber." Can't stand these independent contractors doing their thing. Taxis go on strike, the airport goes on strike, and then the president yelled at the finance minister. We did 10 minutes of research and found the most amazing anecdote: Outside Paris you have the suburbs called the banlieues, which is full of North African immigrants—it's like South Central LA in the 80s. If you go in you may not come back out: drugs, gangs, the whole lot. The French government has spent $40 billion trying to solve that problem over the decades. Uber comes in, in 18 months the crime rate drops by 10 times. Why? Because they're all out driving. The labor liquidity offered by a gig economy like Uber or any of these others makes it so that anybody can go work when they have the time. A single mother can drop their child off at school, drive for a few hours, come back and make a viable living. That is the future that we're going to be living into, and the platforms that support that. Note that most big companies don't still—that's where we're going to go today. Most big companies have about 3 to 4% independent contractors; we think that's going to go to about 30%.
Max: Is it a good idea to start an EXO that uses large language models to ask what a user wants to do in life then maps a career path, daily tasks toward goal completion?
Max, we're going to be talking about the steps for creating an EXO. It begins with having a massive transformative purpose (MTP) and then you're going to pull in the tools that you need to use to achieve that MTP. Large language models are a tool usable across the board, but I wouldn't start with a shiny widget and build a company around that. What is the problem you want to solve? Focus on your MTP and then figure this out. This is really important: The traditional model was find a great idea and then try and push it into the marketplace. We recommend strongly that you start with an MTP and then find the technology, skills, capabilities that will satisfy that because the technologies are changing all the time but your MTP—the problem you want to solve until you solve it—is going to be there for a while.
Adam: Clean energy, solar panels, batteries is showing exponential growth over long term—how does this fit within the EXO construct and approaches?
Solar, fusion, and wind are technologies. The EXO construct is really about what kind of a company you're going to build and who you're going to serve around that, but note that you are correct Adam—there's unbelievable potential happening. Solar energy is on a doubling pattern—doubling every 22 months, and it's been doing this for 40 years. At this pace we will be able to deliver the entire world's energy needs in four doublings—we're like eight years away. 50% of all electric new energy on the grid this year in 2023 is from solar. Lithium iron batteries have dropped 90% in cost over the last 10 years. When you build a company on that exponential trend—like drones that are doubling every 9 months—your company will grow along with the underlying technology. When Jeff Bezos was scanning around to start a company he noticed the internet was going 2,300% per year so he said, "All right, I'm just going to sell books over the internet," and the bookstore grew 2,300% a year along with that. You really want to piggyback these exponential trends and build a company but start with the MTP.
Paco: How to include 10x social and environmental exponential impact as well as 10x growth in the EXO model?
This should be taken care of by the MTP. If you have an MTP of solving transportation like Elon or others, basically the social and environmental aspects are built into that MTP. By definition you're a very ethical company—you're trying to do good in the world, you're trying to solve a fundamental problem. If you have a negative MTP or your MTP is not inspirational enough or contributory enough to solving some of the big problems, you won't attract a community. If you don't attract community then you can't scale very effectively. It all starts with the MTP.
We're going to go into our internal attributes—we've got five internal attributes. The scale elements, which were the externalities, allow you to keep a small footprint and scale very quickly. These five internal mechanisms allow you to manage the control framework and drive culture in your exponential organization.
Interfaces—you can think of them as APIs as well. If you're a rapidly growing organization and you're bringing on customers, you're bringing on community, there's no way that humans enable you to scale at the rate of thousands, tens of thousands, millions. You need to automate that really and that is your interface—those are your APIs. These allow you to scale your organization; they also allow you to turn your organization into a platform. One of the platforms I love was when Chad Hurley created YouTube and enabled at the intersection of all these exponentials—cheap memory, cheap smartphones, high bandwidth internet—and allowed anybody to upload and then to monetize that. Uber is the poster child of these interfaces: it interfaces with me as a customer when I'm calling up Uber, Uber Eats, whatever it might be, and interfaces with the drivers. It's that agility that enables that. The App Store—Steve Jobs created this app store on top of a smartphone making it accessible to anybody.
User interface moment: Look for these moments—they're really important. When you've got a very complex infrastructure like the ARPANET, the predecessor to the internet, which very few people could use, here comes Marc Andreessen and he creates Mosaic—a user interface moment on top of ARPANET allowing anybody to build websites and utilize this backbone of connectivity and then all of a sudden boom, the worldwide web explodes. Coinbase is a user interface moment allowing any of us to buy and transact very easily these cryptocurrencies. The other best example right now we're living through it is ChatGPT—it is very much a user interface moment allowing us to utilize large language models extremely easily.
Note that all platform businesses use interfaces. You want to automate the supply side and the demand side. Google Ads—they've automated the buying of ads and the selling of ads and therefore they can scale effortlessly. Same with Uber—the interface between Uber and its drivers is actually a form of intellectual property. This is the most underrecognized element in business today: the interfaces between your company and the outside and how you automate those. We're thinking there's going to be books written about the future of interfaces to manage and navigate. If you can automate the interface, which is automating one of the scale elements. X Prize when we run teams—ET—the more you can automate the interaction with the team. If I'm an entrepreneur right now I'd be looking to build a platform. Super critical interfaces.
Dashboards are critical because if you're building an EXO and things are going wrong or things are going right, you want to know as fast as possible. There are two pieces and two sides of dashboards: one is the external dashboards, which is the realtime engagement metrics that your organization is tracking, and on the inside OKRs—objectives and key results.
Almost every Silicon Valley company uses OKRs to manage the control framework, performance management, team and individual performance. Google has taken it to an extra step by making their OKR system completely transparent—so if I'm an employee I can look up anybody else's past performance and what they're currently working on to see is it worth collaborating with them.
On the external side, companies are tracking—for example, Focus at Will, which streams music to put your brain in an alpha state, publishes to all the stakeholders the current number of free users, paid users, the churn, the average revenue rate, the monthly revenue rate and publishes like 30 statistics that operate in real time. These two components are absolutely critical—they're the headlights that keep you seeing if you're on the road or not as you head towards your MTP.
Negative example: WeWork didn't have adequate dashboards and didn't realize they were losing money every time they opened an office. They scaled the company before they lost money on every transaction—so they scaled their losses. You really want to get your unit metrics right before you scale, which is also called product-market fit. Dashboards are absolutely critical for all of that.
There are two principal elements in experimentation and to a large degree this is a culture that you need to build into your company from the beginning. The most successful companies are data-driven, founder-led, experimental companies—companies that it's their second nature to run experiments constantly. Part of this is Lean Startup thinking and the other is creating a culture of risk. In a lot of nations around the world failure is a death sentence and that's a problem. Ultimately one of the benefits of the Silicon Valley mentality is if I failed that means I've learned and I'm likely not to make that mistake again. You need to be building a learning organization.
Experimentation eats strategy for breakfast.
Overcoming the tyranny of confidence.
The old world: you had the expert, the gray beard who said, "Well this is the way we've done it and I'm super confident." That tyranny of confidence can destroy you. The day before something truly is a breakthrough it's a crazy idea. If you're confident in the old way of thinking or if you're an expert can tell you exactly how it can't be done, you're stuck.
Rapid experimentation cycle. The king of experimentation has truly been Amazon. > "Our success is a function of the number of experiments we run per day per week per year." They built an entire organization around that. Data-driven, founder-led, experimental organizations—hypercritical.
Because the world is changing all the time you have to be running non-stop experiments to be the sensemaking of this. You can't formulate strategy in today's world because the world is changing so fast. The best strategy in the world failed when the pandemic hit. You could have the best strategy as a technology company until ChatGPT launched—so you have to be constantly running experiments of sensemaking.
Example: Eric Yuan was building WebEx for Cisco; he wanted to try a bunch of things with WebEx and Cisco wouldn't let him, so he went outside, built Zoom and boom—we have the world's most popular video interface because he wanted to experiment; the big company wouldn't let him.
Astro Teller, captain of moonshots at Alphabet X: [Video] > "We need people to become lifelong learners and the number one reason that we aren't lifelong learners is cuz you don't learn from confirmation bias—you learn when you're wrong. Failure is the only meaningful mechanism for improvement and yet it's the thing we avoid—it's the ultimate no no. So if you want your team to be obsessed with learning, which I believe is the only way to be obsessed with winning, then they need to find failure to be something they can say with active pride."
It's really hard—it's against human nature for us to be tolerant of failure. But if you're going to be experimenting you have to be holding out for that pearl that is that aha moment. All of this is in the book—we made it free for anybody that wants to go read the book in this webinar and then 99 cents for this first week as we want maximum adoption—buy it for your teams etc. We now have such incredible proof that the model works.
Most big companies around the world have a really tough time with experimentation. One of the questions we ask in our survey when we do a quantified score of a company is to what extent do you tolerate risk-taking and failure inside your organization:
- Level 1: If you fail you're done—it's a career-limiting move (CLM).
- Level 2: We say we tolerate risk but really we don't.
- Level 3: You tolerate risk in innovation areas or sandbox areas but not in the mission-critical aspects of the company.
- Level 4: Pervasive across the company and measured.
For example, Amazon—for every team in Amazon is asking how many experiments did you run this quarter, how many succeeded, how many failed. If you don't run enough experiments, not enough failing, you're in trouble because they want to be constantly learning. The future of organizations is going to be a learning organization and that's what experimentation gives you.
Autonomy has a couple of pieces to it—it's the A in IDEAS and it's about decentralizing decision-making and pushing it down to the edges of the company. Why? Because the people at the edge of your company have the closest contact with the end customer. Valve is a great example: Valve Software is about 400 people—they have no CEO, no reporting lines, no job descriptions, no management meeting, no meetings of any kind. They literally operate like a beehive: if there's a bug in the software platform, I grab three people, we go fix the bug and we disband. Every employee self-selects as to what they want to do. It sounds kind of like a joke but they get more revenue per employee than Microsoft for doing this. The more you can push decision-making out, the more flexibility and more resilience you build into your organization. In this very volatile world you want as much decentralization as possible.
The end point of autonomy is DAOs—decentralized autonomous organizations—where smart contracts will be the interfaces between the organization and the outside world and the whole organization can run pretty much autonomously. The poster child of this is Bitcoin, which is just a protocol and anybody can self-select to run a Bitcoin node or not—it's completely decentralized. This is incredibly difficult for a linear or traditional organization to get their head around—very hard to implement into a legacy organization.
Zappos: When they do an online promotion everybody goes to the phone banks; when it's regulatory or reporting time the chief risk officer says, "Hey I need help," and everybody goes to those systems. It makes it much more fun for everybody—very difficult again to introduce into a legacy organization.
Social technologies is the peer-to-peer collaborative technologies that allow you to communicate and collaborate peer-to-peer. We have really good evidence today that peer-to-peer working is much more valuable than traditional top-down command and control—your manager tells you what to do.
Think about if you have a traditional organization: the C-suite or senior management decides to do something, it filters down through layers of middle management, gets to the some something to do at the end point—the people at the coalface are probably doing the wrong thing because they've got the wrong messages. They get reports in for what's happening which filter up through all those layers which takes unbelievable amount of time and inevitably they get the wrong information.
Great example: IBM in the 90s was trying to figure out how important was social, was open-source software. They went to all the CIOs of the Fortune 500 and said, "How many of you are using open source software in your technology stack?" 95% said no—we use Oracle, we use Microsoft, centralized, we need control. So they went to the sysadmins that were running the technology stack themselves: "How many of you use open source?" 94% said yes. Who's more in control? The sysadmins who are doing the work. So they made a massive bet on open source which worked.
Enabling peer-to-peer tech collaboration is incredibly powerful. We have a ton of tools: Zoom, Discord (used today by almost all of the web3 world), Slack, Asana, WhatsApp has now got community features built in, etc. Because that's the clear value when you can have social technologies connecting not just your team members but your community. Real community happens when you have peer-to-peer value creation in the community—incredibly important.
What happens when the CEO is not watching? COVID could not have come at a more opportune time to drive social technologies and I don't think we've seen a fraction of the social technologies that are being built right now that are going to emerge 3 to 5 years post-COVID. This allows you to get access to incredible genius around the world—geographic arbitrage. If you can't afford that AI scientist who's in downtown San Francisco, maybe they're in Poland, maybe they're in Brazil, but end of the day these social technologies enable you to bring them on staff on demand onto your team as if they were right there.
Important announcement yesterday: a new social technology that is lighting up the internet that's going to make this that much easier.
[Apple Vision Pro Video] Introducing Apple Vision Pro. Vision Pro is a new kind of computer that augments reality by seamlessly blending the real world with the digital world. It's the first Apple product you look through and not at, and you control Vision Pro using the most natural and intuitive tools: your eyes, hands, and voice. Apple Vision Pro helps you stay connected to those around you—when someone is nearby they will appear in your view. Vision Pro will simultaneously reveal your eyes to them. FaceTime now becomes spatial, taking advantage of the room around you—you can join a group call and see everyone life-size as new people join, FaceTime simply expands. It delivers a natural representation which dynamically matches your facial and hand movement.
We're going to see the ability for you to have interactions with your team members anywhere on the planet as if they're there and really get out of the tyranny of the small boxes on Zoom. Note that the imaging in virtual reality etc. is getting to the point where pretty soon the resolution of a VR headset will be higher than the human eye. In a very short order—next couple of years—virtual reality will disrupt reality. That's 4K per eye right now—I think we're still a couple doublings away from that. But at the end of the day it's about making it fun and easy and engaging. I miss an office, I miss the interactions—Zoom doesn't do it for me fully; I hope that this will.
It's now time for your questions. We've finished all of the attributes—MTP, scale, and IDEAS of an EXO. Let's take some more questions then we're going to take a short break and get to the best part: how do you actually build an EXO—so stick around for that.
John: Why has blockchain enterprise adoption been so slow? What's the catalyst to change this?
All of these new technologies come with risk. The most insightful thing in Abundance was the fact that we have an amygdala. That amygdala is there for scanning for danger. When we were running around on the plains of Africa if you heard a noise in the bushes you ran—why? Because bad news can kill you, good news doesn't kill you. If I miss some good news I might miss some fruit that I could eat; if I miss some bad news I died. We're 10 times more likely to pay attention to bad news than good news because of the danger factor. When we come across a new technology—autonomous cars, drones—the first reaction is the amygdala going, "Oh my God that's dangerous." Autonomous cars might kill somebody—let's ban the cars until we understand. We saw Italy banning ChatGPT—why? Why do you ban it out because you don't want a robot
Killing people—we'd much rather have drunk people killing people than robots killing people. This is why you have to be very evidentially based. Blockchain is tough in enterprises because it's new, uncertain, entails risk, and big companies are bad at risk. The catalyst is EXOs growing up and supplanting big companies. Blockchain tools like Casper, one of the most sophisticated enterprise-grade ones, will allow enterprise adoption with resilience and security enterprises need. It will take time; we're still in crypto winter for enterprise blockchain adoption.
10x organizations leverage technologies to create impacts, but most exponential impacts are felt in the global North. This is true for now. EXOs birthplace was Silicon Valley, where risk is experience. In most parts of the world, failing means you're a failure.
Anecdote: Friend did eight startups, seven venture-backed; eighth is a billion-dollar company. VC funded him through five failures, then sixth, seventh, finally jackpot on eighth. This wouldn't happen elsewhere—if you fail once or twice, no more funding. VC said: "That guy is so crazy, the one thing we know is he's never going to stop. He's going to keep plugging away until he succeeds, and we want to be there when he does."
Silicon Valley success from repetition and resilience. These patterns spreading globally.
Example of democratization and dematerialization: Vega, third fastest electric car in the world, 900 horsepower, designed, engineered, built in Sri Lanka. No ecosystem, expertise, experience, funding. If you can build the third fastest electric car on an island of fishermen and farmers, you can do anything anywhere.
Major breakthroughs in next decade or two from emerging markets—they don't have to unlearn 50 years of industrialization, no huge immune system. Can be leaders. Seeing this in Africa, especially Nigeria, hotbed of entrepreneurialism.
Two points on linear to exponential: First time in history, dozen technologies moving quickly—never had a dozen doubling at once. Intersecting them adds multiplier.
Second: Throughout history, advanced technologies cost a lot, only government or big corporate labs could do R&D. Today, advanced technologies cheap: solar energy cheap, sensors cheap, AI tools free, blockchain open source and free. Anybody can enter legacy industry with beginner's mind, leverage new ideas, disrupt.
Explosion of innovation from everywhere, more from global South and emerging markets because hungrier. Example: Vitalik Buterin, 18-year-old middle-class kid in Toronto, with friends ignores professors, creates Ethereum, $300-400 billion ecosystem with eight guys. No banker could create Ethereum.
Question from AE in Kenya: What happens to businesses that can't be digitized/dematerialized, e.g., farming, food production, medication? We're not going to eat bits, agree, but elements can be digitized.
Examples: Stem cell grown meats via cellular agriculture—grow in vat instead of entire chicken/cow/pig. Vertical farming: 24/7, continuous growth cycle, no pesticides, control pH and micronutrients.
Just because done same way for 100/1000 years doesn't mean can't do better.
Agriculture (second oldest industry): Horizontal agriculture for thousands of years—70% global fresh water to agriculture, 99% wasted. Now vertical farming, hydroponics, aeroponics tipping to economic viability, explosive growth.
Vertical farms: 5x yield of traditional. 35 skyscrapers in Manhattan as vertical farms could feed entire city sustainably—no need millions of square kilometers.
Top 5 food producing countries: US, Brazil, China, Russia (biggest land). Top 5 food exporting: #1 US, #2 Holland/Netherlands (tiny on map), exports $70 billion food/year via tech-enabled greenhouses.
Intersection of exponential tech with farming: Genetics—new Chinese cows 50% more milk/cow; P23 rice 8 yields/crops, 60% less labor. Drones, robotics for growing, collecting, distributing.
Immune system responses: France banned GMOs to Africa, banned Uber. Costing lives—people starving. Agriculture minister: "It's really great to talk about GMOs but can we eat first?"
Served trillion meals worldwide with GMOs, zero deaths or public health problems.
Amygdala response at group/country level. Need data: gather data, run experiments.
Yanik: Essential aspects for team of exponential entrepreneurs: United by massive transformative purpose (MTP), data-driven decision-making, experimental culture, attributes in book. Top three: MTP, data-driven, experimental, mindset.
Five-minute break. Hear from EXO community on excitement for EXO world and book (Exponential Organizations 2.0, second edition; first co-authored with Mike Malone, Peter Diamandis added value).
Testimonials:
- EXO puts me in room with brilliant talent to solve problems. Founded EXO Angels, developed open EXO experience game for onboarding.
- L from Educate for Life: EXO framework operating system for adapting education, leveraging human development in tech world.
- De Franco Chua, Hungary: Journey started 2015 reading Salim's book, sold company to join Open EXO. Worked every continent, mid/corps/big corps transformations, trained EXO coaches.
- Michael Freebe, Germany, serial entrepreneur/health tech professor: Combined exp tech with abundance concepts, shift from fee-for-service to prediction/prevention/global democratization in healthcare.
- Year 2018, met Salim in Bangalore, joined community/MTP next week. Learned more in 5 years than 30 in corporate/business. Purpose: leave no individual behind.
- Karina: Met diverse exponential professionals, found purpose as north star. Founded EXO Latin and EXO Man community.
- Sanjay Bner, Johannesburg, South Africa: Shifted from scarcity to abundance thinking, from local to global scale impact.
- EXO helped believe company transformations possible, understand disruption/TW (super helpful in pandemic), empathy with immune system.
Both dads with kids turning 12. JB (friends with Joe Polish, John and Missy Butcher): Applying to parenting for EXO mindset.
Three things wanted from kids: 1) Find purpose/MTP (e.g., passion for space like Apollo/Star Trek). 2) Ask great questions (advice to top CEOs). 3) Grit—not giving up.
Fundamental shift: From supply-side (become engineer/doctor/lawyer) to demand-side (MTP—what excites you, problem to solve). Best parenting: Follow passion, belief tools extraordinary, no unsolvable problem.
Abundance 360 conference best ever. Parenting 20-30 years ago: No resources, ask useless friends/family. Now: Online resources, parenting groups, gurus—100x info. Kids better due to exponential parenting resources, scarcity to abundance.
First book: 9 implications—
- Death to 5-year plan (out of date by completion, or more time maintaining than doing).
- Rent don't own.
- Trust beats control, open beats closed (Jerry Mulski: scarcity = abundance minus trust. Aligned on MTP, let people do, open > closed).
- Everything measurable, anything knowable (trillions sensors, near infinite info. E.g., average spectral color man's jacket on Madison Avenue via cameras/AI, correlate to ad campaigns. Quality of questions fundamental).
Added 9 more (read book):
- Steven Kotler: EXO structure generates serendipity, organization flow state.
- Decentralization, DAOs.
- Everything AI-enabled, smart ($5 AI chips, 5G/6G, everything connected/addressable/knowable).
- Data-driven leadership (past intuition irrelevant; run experiments, ruthlessly data-driven).
- Technological socialism (Harry Dent?): Uber algorithm matches driver/passenger—hyper efficient sharing without centralization/corruption.
- Government departments becoming EXOs: Nishan Dearin designed Ministry of Oceans, Mauritius (2M sq km ocean, fishermen as community eyes/ears).
Mindset area of most time spent, most important. What enabled great leaders (Steve Jobs, Martine Rothblatt, Elon Musk, Martin Luther King)—technology/money or mindset? Mindset: How you deal with things in instant, navigates challenges/opportunities.
What mindset do you have? What needed for decade ahead?
I think it's one of the most critical questions. Dan Sullivan and Strategic Coach was mentioned earlier. 12 years ago, I made a 25-year commitment to run Abundance 360 (A360), a program mentoring 360 CEOs, entrepreneurs, and business owners over the course of the year. We meet for 4.5 days in LA every March for the Abundance 360 Summit, then run implementation workshops, mindset masterminds, and member matching. My mission is to serve exponential entrepreneurs. If interested, check out a360—we have a small number of openings each year. My goal throughout A360 is to help maintain your mindset because every day we're bombarded by CNN, the Crisis News Network, shifting mindset toward scarcity and fear.
Our neocortex is a neural net trained by evidence after evidence. Watching the Crisis News Network delivers every murder on the planet in color to your living room, putting you in fear and scarcity. That mindset puts you on your heels, the worst place to build an EXO and be an exponential entrepreneur.
There are six key mindsets I teach, write about, and practice:
- Curiosity mindset: Asking great questions, driving creativity, staying adaptable, pivoting, evolving. Beginner's mind is fundamental. If stuck reacting due to 'this is the way it used to be' in fear and scarcity, you're not adaptable—you're the dinosaur, not the furry mammal when the asteroid strikes.
- Abundance mindset (namesake of Abundance 360): Perspective shift realizing nothing is truly scarce. Mindset mugs exemplify this—mine says 'How would you live life if there was no scarcity?' Another: 'How can you create a life...'; exponential one: '10 to the 9+ mindset: How can you create a life of 10x impact.' Mindset shaped by people, conversations, what's on your wall, watching, reading. Guide and guard your mindset every moment—it's fundamentally critical.
With a scarcity mindset, if you have a pie and more people come for dinner, you slice it thinner. Abundance mindset: bake more pies.
No water scarcity—we live on a planet 2/3 covered by water (97.5% salt, 2% ice; fight over 0.5%). Technologies coming: launching $100+ million XPRIZE for large-scale desalination. Technology is a resource-liberating force (solar, fuel fusion, water).
- Exponential mindset: Fundamental to EXO conversation. Make as much progress in next decade as past century. Every company and industry will transform—disrupt yourself before someone else does.
- Moonshot mindset (learned from Astro Teller): Go 10x bigger, not 10% improvement. Wish for kids and entrepreneurs: find MTP and juicy moonshot driving accomplishment.
You spend every minute managing your mindset. How many have self-reflection: Am I in scarcity or abundance? As CEO/leader, your mindset pervades organization—if in fear/scarcity, so are employees. Lead by example: posters on walls, mugs, conversations, filter employment by mindset.
Last night, mindset was TCH (tired, cranky, hungry).
Next 30 years dictate next 300—we're at profound inflection point where everything changes. When writing first EXO book 10 years ago, hard conversation: Tesla and SpaceX didn't really exist.
NASA Space Shuttle: $600 million per launch ($4 billion budget, 20,000 people/infrastructure). Zero launches: infinite cost; one: $4 billion; average 3-4/year: ~$1 billion/launch.
SpaceX: 10x drop to $60 million/launch. Relativity Space: Terran 1 90% 3D printed; Terran R reusable. Starship: Another 100x drop to ~$1 million/launch.
Rocket launch (physical fuel/stuff): 100x drop last 20 years, another 100x next 10. Every industry transforms—need these mindsets.
Jeff Hoffman (founder Priceline, built multi-billion global company; runs Global Entrepreneurship Network ~30 million entrepreneurs): 'Congratulations to you and Peter on EXO 2.0. Excited to share across network. Our mission: help anyone anywhere start/scale venture. Build ecosystems to derisk/increase success odds—exactly what EXO does.'
12-step program to build EXO:
Step 1: Define MTP
Most important: MTP (Massive Transformative Purpose)—what fundamental problem to solve. Use moonshot planner tool, MTP tool, ask friends what you wanted as kid. Challenge: Share at cocktail party—'My MTP is...' Explain it. Outward-facing MTP magnetizes partners/community: 'You've got to meet this person.' (Saying 'transform civilization' doesn't work.)
Step 2: Join/Create Communities
Join/create around MTP (e.g., cure cancer: Meetup/groups). Find like-minded, share MTP, build/connect to largest group reflecting values. Unifies team like pulling string—avoids split purposes. Future: Hire based on individual's MTP alignment with company's.
Step 3: Assemble Team
Four roles: CEO/founder visionary, product person, builder, business model/finance person. Next billion-dollar company: 3 people leveraging OpenAI/LLMs—CEO (vision/marketing), product (builds via LLMs), operations (AI chatbots).
Step 4: Breakthrough Idea
Step 4, not 1. MTP lasts decade(s); tech/business model serves it (tech obsoletes fast). Flesh out: Lean Startup business model canvas (Alex Osterwalder) or EXO canvas (exocanvas.com)—partners, channels, customers, vendors, value prop. Fill before building to tease mistakes. Go long without building.
Get free feedback: Talk to 100 people (not 'give away idea'). Idea value rounds to zero (Elon Musk)—all about implementation/manufacturability. Sharing finds failures/helpers; if right person/MTP-driven, idea is first incremental step.
Step 5: Business Model
Favorite part: Business model innovation > tech. Chris Anderson (Free book): Info widely available → models go to free + layers (ads/subscription). Music: 8 studios sold scarcity (cassette/CD/DVD) → digitized → iTunes/Spotify abundance subscription. Same in books/news; coming to transport/healthcare/education.
Kevin Kelly Better Than Free response: 8 ways add value to free info:
- Accessibility (Airbnb)
- Findability (Uber)
- Personalization (Facebook)
- Immediacy (financial markets)
21st-century models focus here. Kevin Kelly/Chris Anderson What Technology Wants: Tech pace inexorable, wants to be free/abundant (vs. human scarcity nature).
Step 6: Build MVP
Lean Startup: Smallest feature footprint to launch/test customers. Data-driven: No plan survives first customer (Steve Blank). If not embarrassed at launch, waited too long (Reid Hoffman)—validate assumptions.
Flickr's Katarina Fake: Of 20 features, build 2 key ones, launch, feedback loop.
Prioritize by learning most first (constant testing).
Step 7-8: Validate Marketing/Sales, Achieve Product-Market Fit
Manage funnel: Interested → free signup → paid → churn. Enterprise sales (9 months): Big front-end funnel. Achieve product-market fit: Paying customers excited.
Applies to startups/big companies (50k employees)—iterate via MVP. Big cos bad at this (wait for perfect). Amazon iterates constantly.
Amazon Prime: Proposed as experiment, considered foolish; Bezos: 'Try it.' Now 25% of Amazon. Amazon Web Services (AWS): 75% profits.
Amazon Institutional Yes policy: Manager can't say no to idea—must write 2-page public thesis why bad. Friction/embarrassment to 'no' → test with data. Enabled AWS (off-roadmap).
Kickstarter: Young cos + large corps test (colors/features). Pebble Watch (fellow Waterloo Grant—Eric Migicovsky).
Founder came out of Y Combinator, best incubator with best network, tried to raise $100,000 for running watch prototype. All investors said no due to Silicon Valley bias against hardware. With three weeks of cash left, launched desperate Kickstarter to pre-sell watch, raised $10 million.
This shows:
- All investors were wrong (investors use portfolio approach).
- Crowdfunding makes sophisticated Silicon Valley investment ecosystem irrelevant.
- First time in business history to validate demand without building product.
Eric now had to build many more watches, flew to China. Great problem: $10M in bank. Sony now launches anonymous Kickstarter campaigns, funds successful ones for validation. Critical: data-driven decisions, not listening to experts.
Once funnel is set, implement EXO attributes of scale (staff on demand, community, crowd, algorithms, leverage assets) and ideas (engagement models, interfaces to automate with customers, dashboards, experimentation, decentralize decision-making, social technologies internally).
Not all 10 at once; start with a couple, plan to add more. Originally, implementing 4 made you EXO; now data shows implement all or someone else will. More implementation = better. Dashboards give real-time business sense; experimentation builds learning organization. No excuse not to implement fundamentals.
Example: Australian public company Smart Group picks 10 people quarterly, each implements one scale/ideas attribute (10 projects nonstop). Grew 5x in 2 years.
Culture begins from start: what happens when CEO not watching, interactions between employees/founders. Starts with MTP.
Drive: data-driven experimentalism, fundamentals.
EXO structure removes politics (traditional companies focus internally; EXOs focus externally on solving problems). More attributes keep culture young, learning-oriented toward MTP.
Relates to experimentation: retest pricing, MTP alignment. Companies drift (e.g., ExO almost became consulting company; community called them out).
Hard to gauge from inside; need active advisors testing MTP alignment.
Burt Rutan (Scaled Composites, built Spaceship One for $10M XPRIZE): >"Question, don't defend." Defending backs you into corner, prevents exploration, not telling truth.
Build culture allowing questions anytime.
Video of Burt amazing. XPRIZE: $10M prize → 30-40 teams spend $150M in R&D (most leveraged innovation model, crowdsources teams).
Carbon extraction prize: 1,200 teams for Elon's $100M. New Wildfire XPRIZE: 60-70 teams after 1 month designing autonomous wildfire extinguishing in 10 minutes without humans.
Changes business models: fire insurance pays after; flip to prevent fires.
Funded by Wendy Schmidt, $3M prize post-Deepwater Horizon to double 1980s/Exxon Valdez oil cleanup tech (no prior incentive).
340 teams registered. Top 10: Alaska family mortgaged home; tattoo artist + dentist client (dentist funded, tested in jacuzzi, first full-scale at facility, came 2nd).
VCs wouldn't fund them (no experience). Crowd magic: abundance solves problems. Check xprize.org, get involved.
Sim on board; Nan Sari (funded first $10M prize, flew privately to space station 10 days) now CEO; Peter executive chairman. Launched $300M in prizes, another $250M coming. Mission: crowdsource solutions to biggest problems (build/demonstrate, not ideas).
Yahoo, BlackBerry, Nokia failed; Google, Apple, Facebook, Amazon succeeded as platforms (coral reefs feeding ecosystems).
Incentivized support: revenue tied to platform (YouTube pros average $4,000/month). MrBeast studied YouTube 3 years pre-first video to understand algorithms/economics.
Thrasio (fraternity brother Carlos Cashman): Scoured Amazon for low-revenue/high-review sellers (poor marketing). Advised, then bought. At conference: "Over $1M revenue? Talk." Line around block. 0 to $2B revenue in 2 years. AI automates finding/outreach. Next-gen CPG; startups say "Thrasio of X".
GitHub highest-rated EXO: platform for developers to share/rate code (gamification, algorithms, staff on demand). 8.5 years old, Microsoft bought for $7.5B. Accountant freaked: no assets/IP/workforce. Satya Nadella: "Buy the community."
GitHub repos enable ChatGPT. Open source: Silicon Valley dev salary 100% GitHub rating (zero correlation to university/degree/grades). Value of CS degree → zero; applies to doctors/lawyers.
Since 2000: 3 trillion lines code written. LLM access = better next code (dev writes 50-100K lines lifetime).
Medicine: 7,000 journals/day; AI reads all (vs. doctor). AI co-pilots for all professions. >"It's not AI taking your job; human using AI taking your job."
Max: Tools to improve question quality, metrics for utility/relevance?
ChatGPT (e.g., "Top 10 questions on this area"). Presented to top C-suite consumer products company: ChatGPT on disrupt/attack/disruptive tech = $500K consulting free. Habit: ask ChatGPT to help ask. Limited thinking; use groups/brainstorming. Open in every exec/board meeting.
Juan: Finance/tech led by strong countries; possible for developing countries to launch EXO?
Yes, more possible/likely. Launch cost near zero, low barriers, less competition, greenfield, regulatory arbitrage (e.g., crypto). Emerging markets: no Harvard MBA unlearning, leapfrog. Mercado Libre biggest on Buenos Aires exchange, is EXO.
Chander Nagpal scored Indian public companies; create investment theses on gaps. By decade end, every company/project/nonprofit/gov dept structured as EXO (data shows better). Opportunities 1000x in emerging markets; hungrier, closer to problems.
Alexandre: Personal MTP + company/project MTP? Must be unique?
Yes. Peter's personal MTP = Abundance360 MTP. Founders' often translates. Can have for family/foundation/country (Greece needs MTP: reinvent democracy/civics/education as birthplace).
Use moonshotplanner.com multiple times. In large org without: pitch to CEO; if no, leave/start own (like Eric Yan).
MTP key: for money fails; for passion, unstoppable.
Google: 340 investor pitches (12 other search engines). Resilience needs MTP. XPRIZE: 150 no's until Anu Hari. One per project (e.g., Peter's: transform civilization → moonshot update institutions, create world-transforming entrepreneurs).
learn.openexo.com: training modules via ExO Pass.
Pulkit: Non-upskillers replaced by AI? Unemployment?
Slide rule vs. calculator: left behind. Not AI, but human+AI takes job.
No mass unemployment historically. ATMs (1970s): feared teller job loss; branches 10x cheaper → 10x more branches, teller # unchanged.
Most robotic countries (South Korea, Sweden, Germany) have lowest unemployment.
Fleming: IP important; keep trade secrets with staff on demand?
IP soon immaterial. Conversation with Steve Jurvetson (DFJ, Tesla/SpaceX board): AI so powerful, product launch → tech scans/replicates instantly.
There's a point in the near future where AI is so powerful that when you launch a product, technology will reinvent and improve on it in half a cycle. If you're dependent on intellectual property to protect you instead of marketing and reinventing yourself constantly, you're going to lose that race. The world is changing so fast that IP becomes less and less relevant. Execution is key: whatever your IP is, say the greatest search engine crawling technology, if you have the passion to execute, nobody will beat you. If someone else grabs it, they need as much passion and to out-execute you. It comes down to how much you're trying, how fast, how aggressively, how much passion you bring, and how well you execute against the idea, not the IP. You can't rest on your laurels; you need an amazing team, an amazing MTP, and constant self-disruption.
Between the attributes of an EXO, there are interdependencies. You can't implement autonomy and decentralize decision-making without an MTP guiding thinking and experimentation. GE implemented the largest corporate training exercise in history, training 60,000 managers on Lean Startup thinking, but it failed because they lacked autonomy. To implement Lean, implement autonomy to let people run exciting experiments. The book documents prerequisites for each attribute: for experimentation, you need dashboards to track if experiments are working and if you're running enough.
For small companies: pick an MTP and turn completely into an EXO. For large companies: do not implement EXO inside the organization—you'll face an immune system response. Big companies cannot innovate internally; corporate innovation leaders get arrows in their backs. Take the crazy people, put them at the edge, and build into adjacent spaces. Example: Nestle tried running Nespresso as a line of business inside Nestle and failed because the value proposition, go-to-market, and product thinking differed from the big food processing company. The CEO put the team on the edge with a brick wall between them and the rest—boom, every hotel room now has an espresso machine. Big companies innovate by creating EXOs off the edge, running an EXO Sprint to break the immune system, then the EXO becomes a new gravity center.
Astro tells it similarly: employees break into two groups—the group delivering 10% annual growth (economic engine, don't break it) and moonshot thinkers driven by MTP on the edge, responsible for 10x (1,000%) growth. They report directly to the CEO, who needs board coverage because 90% of experiments fail. That one out of 10 yields extraordinary success. This is only possible now because experiment costs are low—you can run a portfolio of investments on the edge without telling the CFO, doubling down only on success. A 10x-growing edge startup gets board investment easily.
As CEO, get mindsets in order: abundance, exponential, moonshot, curiosity mindsets; organize your MTP. You don't need expertise in all technologies or AI—what matters is what you're good at, what you love, then find partners for complementary skills. If great at fundraising or marketing, be the best at that and build a founding team. Founder focus: MTP and mindset drive culture—outsource everything else. Elon Musk example: takes MTP (solve transportation), finds exponential technologies (battery storage, solar), projects 10-year exponential curve, aims for that point (takes 10-11 years to build a company). No expertise in space, cars, or energy, yet created market leaders via mindset and first principles thinking.
Elon on Tesla: convinced battery tech viable by spot cost of metals (cobalt, nickel, lithium). On SpaceX: Russian boosters ancient (50 years old) and expensive; convinced fully reusable first stage possible. Started with aerospace textbook, physics background, brilliant intelligence. Founding team intelligence is super important. SpaceX tested 65 things per launch, wired with thousands of sensors for data to update AI models—unlike past aerospace guessing with slide rules. Panel of Apollo astronauts (Buzz Aldrin, 70s) begged government to stop Elon, fearing he'd destroy space industry; he succeeded.
Abundance insight from Singularity University: technology makes available but inaccessible things usable. Bathed in 8,000 times more solar energy daily than consumed; perovskite solar makes it usable. Transformation: available → accessible. Collect evidence at dand.com (abundance charts). Train mind via reading, writing, who you hang with. Abundance 360 (a360) trains mindset year-round for exponential entrepreneurs.
Book at 99 cents for next few days (QR code). Ray chatbot free: sign up, ask "I'm a shipping company, how do I turn into an EXO?"—loads 700 case studies. Buy for friends. Communities: abundance360 (Peter), openexo.com (25,000 people ready to help). learn.openexo.com has rich training. Stick around for questions; Zoom room for more (barcode). Thank you for 3 hours. Purpose: inspire entrepreneurs to create hopeful, abundant future. Entrepreneurs are only group that can change world—risk-tolerant, crazy. Clear methodology: value propositions, support, tools, training, ecosystem. Challenge: find your MTP and go after it. Best time to be entrepreneur/alive (except tomorrow). Uplift humanity, dent universe.
Rodrigo: How EXO model addresses cybersecurity, ethics, sustainability with exponential tech.
Cybersecurity: past fears (internet collapse from phishing, email from spam) solved by algorithms. AI cyber threats met by good AI—arms race. EXO economic thesis: drop cost of demand (internet: online marketing, viral loops to zero acquisition) and supply (Airbnb: near-zero cost to add room vs. building hotel). Enter legacy industries with low marginal supply cost, market cap explodes.
Humans see negatives first (amygdala). Judo flip: world's biggest problems are biggest business opportunities—start EXO to solve. We accelerate future problems to today, but next decade > past century progress solves challenges.
Gil: Scale formula for manufacturing/equipment installation (experience, relationships, customization).
Rocket launches: 100x cost drop, another 100x coming. Agriculture: vertical farming 5x yields; horizontal with drones scanning infrared for disease pockets. AI, VR reinvent design/manufacturing: virtual 3D studio, AI builds, spin/approve, print. 3D printing (Nexa3D, Avi Reichental): 10x speed, 100x material strength, full color, mixed materials. Locked into old ways (farming, manufacturing, design)—all changing rapidly.
S?: Education system outdated—what key subjects add.
Blog coming. Ask ChatGPT: "To deal with accelerating future/AGI, what teach kids?"—agility, great questions, morals/ethics, soft skills, compelling arguments, leadership. Education push-based (cram algebra, kids think lunch). Shift to pull-based, MTP-driven. College grads use ~zero education at work. Hope university collapses in 6 years before kids (12yo) go. Master's in biotech/brain: narrow. Doctoral: e.g., expert in enhancer sequence in plasmid in DNA in bacteria in dirt. AI as co-pilot enables breadth. High school/university reinvent. Master's in Neuroscience: out of date on graduation. Teaching outpaced by subject change. New model: pull learning as needed. No 20-year education + 50 productive. Lifelong online learning. Most valuable: fastest learners.
Alexandre: Model of ChatGPT-like platform for MTP/moonshot—how run/feed it.
Free version prompts on MTP, generates options iteratively based on answers—thinking partner. Design MTP: who hero to, action verbs, end goal. Iterative, fun, easy. In Abundance 360, every member creates MTP (can be narrow/specific). What's important: what wakes you up in
The morning routine gets you excited. Once you have your MTP, a360 members have their moonshot they're working on. At open EXO, there's an entire community of 25,000 people in 140 countries ready to help build your ExO and moonshot with advice and experience. This book was curated with the help of that community. Join open EXO—it's free with an unbelievable amount of resources. Pick your MTP and solve for that area leveraging new technologies.
QR code for the zoom room is up. The community is reconvening in the zoom room where members are ready to answer questions. They've heard the talk and provide a refreshing note. The community learns an unbelievable amount because it's like a hive mind. Everyone sees different things, and when the overall community reconnects, it learns faster collectively. It's incredibly powerful to be part of both communities—join them.
A pleasure. Finally got the second edition out after 3-4 years—people were clamoring for it. With the launch, ExO will likely crack into the top 10 bestselling business books ever published. Thank you to everyone who's been part of it, including wives, Greg O'Brien for running AV, CH Rose Washington for Q&A, Tyler and Kevin for marketing, both communities, and watch parties. Hope you have alcohol or other substances to keep going.
Off to catch a flight. Peter, it's been an absolute honor to share this journey—almost got into it with the original book, but now we're really in it. Inspiring watching you; you've inspired me and millions with abundance thinking, mindsets, and moonshots. Thank you for spawning the original idea of an exponential organization. Thank you to Singularity University community for support and inspiration—check out su.org. Take care, everybody, be well.
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