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Once you have given yourself some space to really
think about the problem that you want to solve.
The message that - the main message I have learned is to
then focus on a problem that is really worthy of you,
worthy of you for several years because these things
always take longer and consume more of your life and
not to focus on a technology that you want to apply.
And that's also about irreverence and letting go of your ego,
because you've come out of Stanford,
a lot of you are PhDs or postdocs,
you've being published and you are respected in your
field and you know so much about it and very often
its just difficult to pry that technology,
that particular know-how out of a person's hand,
so they actually focus on a problem
that the market needs to be solved.
It's very hard.
You got to let go of your ego and look at the market and the
problems in the world and say what do I really want to work
on and learn what I need to learn to solve that problem.
And there are always problems to solve.
Everywhere you look there is problems and as technology becomes
more advanced society evolves around it and there are new problems
and that process of refinement of the problem has no limits.
I have a personal bias on problems that I think are important
over the next 10 years because the best companies so far
out of Silicon Valley have been the IT companies.
They have certainly been the biggest companies.
But if you look at the life we lead today,
if communication networks get much faster and we get much more processing
power and we're able to render all images in 3D holographically,
and we find new ways of making things go ping on the Internet and
making things go ping on your friends' social network pages,
I just don't think it's really going to
change the quality of life so much.
But when you look at life,
when you look at the problems of biology and health,
your physical health, mental health, the problems of ageing,
there are so many challenges out there that are
really worth solving and are going to be solved.
When you look at that world,
it's like that Shakespeare quote where he says,
it's Edgar in King Lear where he says,
"World, world, O world! But that thy
strange mutations make us hate thee,
life would not yield to age."
And there is so much out there that requires intellect to be solved.