One of my favorite interviews to come out of the IDEA MAN book tour is this one from Boing Boing. Rob Beschizza spoke with Microsoft co-founder Paul Allen about several fascinating topics, including private space travel and his ongoing work with the Allen Brain Atlas. Here’s a brief excerpt, and I encourage you to check out the whole thing.
Rob: Is there any advice you could give to people who want to take the same path? How do you focus on new ideas without losing sight of execution?
Paul: To come up with ideas, you have to prepare. You get there by following tech news, a lot of websites, blogs such as BB, and many other things. Stuffing your brain with information. Hopefully, you get an idea for something after you’ve done that for a while: that’s what happened to me. Then you have to put together a team of people, and I was lucky to have Bill Gates, and other people, as my partners through the years to execute those ideas. And you’ve got to test your idea against what’s already out there, to make sure it’s not duplicative, that it really is a green-field idea. All those factors have to work together. And if you’re lucky you come up with something that has the potential to change the world. And that’s incredibly rewarding. But it’s not just the idea. It’s all the effort and the work that come after you have the idea.
Customer service matters and when done right is memorable. Just ask Richard Branson. Guy Kawasaki, author of