175社を立ち上げて得た教訓――ビル・グロスが語る idealab.ai と起業の原則

The business world is moving faster than ever. And when change hits, we need to learn in real time. On Rapid Response, you'll hear candid conversations with CEOs and leaders making tough calls about AI, human talent, responsibility, and the bottom line, how they navigate uncertainty, pressure, and high-stakes moments. I'm Bob Staffian, former editor-in-chief of Best Company, and I'll be your host as each episode breaks down what you need to know right now. You can find Rapid Response wherever you get your podcasts. On Masters of Scale, iconic leaders reveal how they've beaten the odds. Asking really strong questions is a superpower. You want to show up with something radically different and how they've grown companies to incredible heights.

The greatest rewards always come from the greatest risks. That's hit the gas. Airbnb, Zillow, Microsoft, Liquid Deft, and more. Hear from the founders who've changed the game. It's anything but business as usual. Find Masters of Scale on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever else you get podcasts. What are your top concerns for AI? Well, I'm terrified and I'm optimistic at the same time. I think most people are. I'm terrified of no boundaries on AI. I'm terrified of what agents could do when let loose. But I'm also wildly optimistic of how much this can help society. Mike Tyson has this great quote, which I think is so funny to bring a Mike Tyson boxing quote to Business World. but it's everybody has a plan until they get punched in the face. And I think that business punches you in the face all the time.

I first met Bill Gross a couple of years ago. He and I really connected over our vision of technology and AI. Yes, AI is creating massive economic opportunity, but it also has the potential to create so much good in the world. Bill has been an entrepreneur and an investor for several decades. In many ways, he created the OG Venture Studio. He founded Idea Lab in 1996 and has since launched over 100 companies. His latest company, idealab.ai, is really a culmination of his life's work. I got to sit down with Bill while we were both at Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. So I always find Bill so inspiring, and I hope you do too. I'm Rana Elkagyubi, and this is Pioneers of AI, a podcast taking you behind the scenes of the AI revolution.

Thank you, Bill, for joining me. I'm so excited for this conversation. Thank you so much. It's a privilege. All right, so you started the OG Venture Studio. You founded Idea Lab in 1996. Yes. And at this point, you've helped launch 150 plus companies. Now 175. 175 companies with more than 50 IPOs. And acquisitions. And acquisitions. Incredible. So for people who don't know your story, how did you first become interested in entrepreneurship? Well, I think when I was a teenager, I got very excited about finding ways to make money. And I was living during the energy crisis in 1973. and there was an oil shortage because of the embargo, and I got really excited about renewable energy, alternative energy. It was way ahead of its time. But I read about it in Popular Science magazine. I read about it in the library after school, and I started making some little solar devices and made some plans and kits for them and sold them in the back of Popular Science magazine. And I sold the plans for $4, and I sold 10,000 of them. So I paid my way through college with that.

That really gave me the bug. I really was excited by that. When I got to college, I made loudspeakers to pay my way through the rest of the years of college. And everybody on campus brought speakers from me. And when I graduated, the PC came out. And that revolution was incredible. And I think I just love the idea of seeing problems in the world, finding technology that can address it, building something to do it, and making people happy with it. And that just got me fully bitten with that. What I always find so incredibly fascinating every time we interact is that, you know, a lot of people will see problems in the world and whine about it. but you see opportunity. How do you cultivate that mindset? I really think I just like making people happy. So I try and figure out what is the problem they're having and what could I do that would address that, that would make them thrilled. That's one great thing about business. There's many ways to impact people in the world. You can be a teacher and you can impact people that way. You can be a lawyer and make laws. You can be a politician. I love entrepreneurship because you can get people to pull the solution from you. You don't have to push it upon them.

It's a great way of coming up with something that people actually want, and you solve the problem in a way that they want it. And that's just very exciting to me. Yeah. What were some of the early challenges in starting Idea Lab? So I sold a company called Knowledge Adventure in 1995. The Internet was taking off. Netscape had its IPO in 1985. There were, funnily enough, 90 million people who were online. Think about how small that number is now. But I remember that number being, wow, 90 million people online. So I was trying to think of what businesses do I want to bring online. And I had 12 ideas for companies to start. And I was trying to pick the one. And then after not being able to pick, I decided to start all 12. So that was actually the idea of Idea Lab. So the way I started all 12, though, was let's make a place called Idea Lab. I actually modeled it after Thomas Edison's lab. He had a lab in New Jersey. A lot of people don't know this. He would work on multiple things in his lab and spin out each promising idea into a separate company. So the movie projector, that was a separate company.

I had no idea. The light bulb was a separate company, General Electric. So my idea was bring these companies under one roof. Try them out. If they work, spin them out into separate companies. So those first 12 companies, I spun each one of them out. I found a separate CEO for all 12. I gave each one of them $250,000 to start and then helped them grow. and that was very exciting to me. It gave me a chance to have more impact and also solve the problem of me having to choose which one to start. Right, right, right, right. But after starting 12 of them and seeing how gratifying that was to help multiple people run their companies, I continued that. And we were lucky too. Some of those companies were successful, which gave us the funding to continue that. We've now been doing it for 30 years, 1996, 2026, 30 years later, 175 companies. It's just been so gratifying to do this at scale. And now with this new thing, I get to do it at an even bigger scale. Well, let's talk about the new thing. You launched your newest company, Idealab.ai, which I'm a proud investor by Blue Seal Adventures. So glad to have you. It is so cool. Yeah, I'm so excited about it. So tell us what it is.

So Idealab.ai is a list of more than one million great business ideas that are free, free for entrepreneurs everywhere. And what's so exciting about this is the way we came up with them. How do you come up with a million ideas? I can't come up with a million ideas. What I was able to do, though, is take my process for coming up with ideas and bring it to AI. So what's my process for coming up with ideas? I've come up with 31 different ways that I come up with an idea, the way I come up with a company idea. Over the last 30 years, I've looked back at what did I do to come up with that particular idea. Sometimes it's connecting a new technology to an old problem. Sometimes it's taking an old problem whose timing wasn't right but doing it now. So all those different ideas. I programmed those into AI, and then I said to AI, read the news, read patents, read problem statements, extract them, and now apply this methodology. And it generates incredible ideas. Can you give us an example? So one of them, for example, I was shocked that just from reading the news, it came back with this.

It said, I've been reading the news. There's a war in Iran. The Strait of Hormuz is closed. Gas prices keep going up. More than 100 million people in China, US, and Europe are complaining about that. They worried about what gas going to cost next week And its solution which it put together on its own was how about if you make a mobile app where people pay a month it locks in today gas price for them so they have no worries about it increasing. You take the accumulated $5 payments, you hedge gasoline on the New York Mercantile Exchange, and you effectively bring airline-level hedging to consumers. And my mind was blown when I saw that because I knew what hedging was, but I never thought about connecting that. It's almost like AI has perfect lateral thinking, that it can look in two different directions and pull two things together. And that's a great aspect of a good idea. And there's a million more like that in every category. It could be in climate, in agriculture, in energy, in gasoline, in biotech. There are ideas in there for everybody. So we made the database searchable.

We made it so that people can go type in, what are my skills? What are my passions? What do I care about and it works. Are you able to track what people are like, like kind of, is there, are there some ideas that are bubbling to the top that everybody wants to build? I haven't seen that yet, but we are allowing two people who find the same idea to connect. Oh, I love that. We really love the idea about maybe co-founders will join or what about this? What about an idea that one person wants to do in Egypt? Another person wants to do in Venezuela, they could collaborate, but build a products for each of their separate markets. So I'm really excited about how people might use this for benefiting society. Yeah. Are you worried that some of the ideas in the database could be nefarious ideas or dangerous ideas? We screened for that. Okay. So we generated more than 1 million ideas. Then we did a pass and removed 200,000 that possibly could be dangerous. So we went through and tried to make sure that everything that we're proposing for people is for good. So one of your, I guess, visions for idealab.ai is to kind of use it as a vehicle for reimagining education, what higher education looks like.

Tell us more about that. Well, I really think that there's a lot of schools that the students who are graduating are worried about, what are my early opportunities after I graduate? With AI changing everything, are there entry-level things for me? But what about if AI could help you have an idea that you could start something yourself? You don't have to rely on an entry-level job. You make your own. So I'm talking to a whole bunch of colleges about integrating this into their curriculum. And, for example, ASU has a vision of telling students, apply to ASU. Pick an idea from this database. Instead of paying, we'll pay you to come to college and give you capital to start your idea. If we can make more of that happen, just think of how many students might start something that they're really passionate about. Even if they don't start that company after they graduate, just the learning experience of practicing it while they're in school could be incredible. I want to give more people a chance for entrepreneurship. By the way, entrepreneurship is not for everybody. But if we lower the bar so that we can narrow the gap

between I wish and I can, that would be huge. That would be huge for society. I remember seeing an early prototype of the database and you're able to, like, parametrize, basically when you're searching and querying, you're able to say, okay, I want a company that's in climate, in Egypt, da-da-da, but also that requires whatever amount of funding that you can afford. And I thought that was really clever. We're so excited. You can say, I want a company that takes less than $50,000 to start, or I want a company that's designed for a solo founder or a team of two to five. And then, of course, the idea is just a starting point. We do need to help people get the capital. and I want people to apply for capital. We'll try and connect them to people with funding. And I want to help people actually execute their business. And that's where we have this periodic table of business functions because you need the mechanics to run your business too. If you're an early founder and you haven't run a business before, you need a lot of help. And I want to try and give that help. Yeah, I want to talk about that because, you know, AI has lowered the barrier to vibe code. Like you can vibe code any idea you want over a weekend,

but that's not enough to launch business, right? Yes. So how do you go from idea to actually launching a business? And tell us about this periodic table. So the periodic table of business functions are the 118 functions that we've derived that cover everything you might ever need to do in a business. What's an example? And starting from the idea, the app, your advertising, your website, demand creation, demand validation, but then... Incorporating, legal stuff. Absolutely. Your QuickBooks, your finance, payables, receivables, payroll, everything. and we were able to group those into 118 things. Each of those things, there are many companies who provide services for them. Some of those things, nobody provides services for and nobody provides a connector to all of them. So we want to try and make a layer, kind of like an agentic OS layer to run your company so that you don't have to know how to start QuickBooks or link to it or get it going. It's just natively in your business from the beginning because of this agentic OS and that's going to help people a lot.

And over time... The autonomy will grow so that the human running your business is really just for the judgment, not for the mechanics. There's no reason that I need to know the mechanics of how to optimize my Facebook campaign. I just need to be able to say, I'd like to run a Facebook campaign. I want to target this audience. I'd like to spend $1,000. Go optimize it and run it for me. And that's the way business is going to grow. That's the way business is going to migrate because that allows a smaller entrepreneur to compete with a bigger company when they have the same tools that that big company has integrated for them without having to learn how to use them. And then is the vision that as the complexity of the business increases, as they hopefully grow and become more and more successful, to then be able to swap in and out some of these? Yes. You might start out with a very simple custom relationship management software angle and then graduate to Salesforce. In every single area, there'll be multiple providers. Think of it like an app store where you go and you can get a simple calculator or a complex calculator or a paid calculator. There might be different levels.

At different times, you need a different function. We want to try and make all of it available. Yeah, so incredible. You've said that this is the culmination of your life's work and your legacy. And to me, this is a great example of a company that has incredible financial upside and opportunity and also incredible societal impact. So tell us more about how you see this. Well, I feel like my whole life I've been trying to start businesses that make a difference, have more positive impact, and help more entrepreneurs succeed. So this just allows me to magnify that scale I never could imagine. But I also feel it can be both wildly philanthropic, like giving away the ideas to people and helping them, and also a great business. So how is it a great business? Large companies also have an innovation problem. Large companies that make hundreds of millions of dollars a year or spend hundreds of millions of dollars a year on R&D have many patents, technologies, IP, trade secrets. They're not monetizing right now. So I want to license them, my whole system,

not just the periodic table, not just the ideas we have, but give them a system to generate new ideas for them based on their own IP. And that I think they'll pay for. And that I think can make it be a great business that helps support the effort of giving away the other ideas for free to entrepreneurs. We will be right back after a short break. I would love to know how you're feeling about AI in general. What are the opportunities you see, obviously, with Idealab, but also, you know, there are a lot of other ideas in the Venture Studio version of Idealab. lab that you're continuing to incubate. And what are your top concerns for AI? Well, I'm terrified and I'm optimistic at the same time. I think most people are. I'm terrified

of no boundaries on AI. I'm terrified of what agents could do when let loose. But I'm also wildly optimistic of how much this can help society. So I guess what I feel I can do in that equation is do as much as I can on the positive side. And I think with every technology, there's good and bad. How do we make the good outweigh the bad? More people focus on that. So I would just love to have more people focused on things that can make AI better for society And by the way in those million ideas there a lot of companies a lot of company ideas there that can address the negatives too And I hope people start them So in other words, there are companies that can... There's probably companies... AI safety, other ways to put boundaries on, other ways to prevent hacking. So there are whole companies that should be built to handle those. Some of them are already being built, but some of them are in a database. I would love to find someone who cares about that to take that company forward, and I want to help them take that forward.

One more thing, out of the million ideas, probably 10% are nonprofits. So there are a lot of ideas in the world, things that need solving, that a business isn't the right way to solve it, but a nonprofit is. So if you have a passion in a given area to make a difference, you still can go into our system, find that great nonprofit. We'll help you design it, help you get the funding for it, and help you take it forward. So helping humanity can be done in many different ways, and I feel like AI can be a great tool to make that possible. So another startup you founded is called Parada and it's basically about paying people for their contributions for AI-generated answers. Why do you feel like it was so important to build this company and do it right now? Parada is very much like the same mission I'm doing with Ideal of AI. I'm looking at things in the world where I can make a positive impact and saying I've got to do something about it if no one else is doing it. We heard about Maria Ressa and how people are stealing her content and causing her great expense because they crawl her site and cause her to pay for that while they're stealing the stuff from her.

After the New York Times sued OpenAI, and the lawsuit hasn't progressed yet, so the New York Times hasn't won the lawsuit yet. I hope they do. We'll see what happens. But I felt the right way to resolve this content being stolen isn't only with lawsuits. It's with a fair business model. So I think a fair business model is a 50-50 rev share when your content is used. Very similar to the way YouTube shares revenue with creators. If YouTube was stealing everybody's content and paying nothing for the advertising revenue they were making, content creators would dry up. You would lose everything that's there. So I feel the same thing should happen with AI. So I felt very passionate about that, and I felt no one's doing anything about that. So that's an opening for me to try and make a business model around that. So we started ProRata to do that. We've signed up 1,600 publications who all agree that a 50-50 rev share is the right method. Amazing. We have the technology to compute the revenue share to take the output of AI. Because you kind of have to reverse engineer the output of the answer, the AI answer.

You kind of have to trace back where the data came from, right? You have to take a look at whatever the AI answer is and say who contributes to that and in what percentage. And you don't have to be exact. You just have to be close. You can be plus or minus 5%. and still make all the publications very happy. So they've all agreed to our methodology. Now we have to convince the AI companies to pay. So how's that going to happen? Well, one, they might lose their lawsuits. Two, more pressure from the journalism. Three, they're going public. They'll have a lot more capital. Maybe they'll agree. Hey, you know what? Maybe it's fair. It's very ironic that some of the AI companies are complaining that the Chinese companies distilled their output. When they stole all the content. Right. So maybe the AI companies with enough capital will decide, you know, we can share some of the revenue with the publications from which we're getting content. And also that will get us more good content. I'll give you one example. When YouTube first came out, it actually was stealing everything. There was no advertising model. There was no revenue share. And every day after Google acquired them, they would get takedown notices from NBC, from ABC, and they would take the content down.

And then YouTube said, hey, you know what? We'll pay you 50-50 if you put the content on. And they all said, absolutely. And that made YouTube flourish. So the content got better when they shared revenue. So I feel like the AI companies will also come to a point where they say they're running out of data. If we want to welcome all data from everybody, let's just share the revenue. So hopefully that time will come within the next year. We'll see what happens. But that's my mission, to try and make that happen. Yeah, we'll see how that happens. You know, I'm an investor, and so we have so many founders who listen to the show. So I would love to unpack what you've learned from starting 175 plus companies. All right. Well, there's a lot of lessons learned. My most favorite one is be bold. Be bold. Be bold because when you're bold, you definitely scare people and often scare yourself. But it's almost equally hard to do a bold company as is to do a meat company. And you're a small company trying to go up against bigger competitors. So you have boldness as your weapon. and I feel that the companies that we started

that were trying to only move the status quo forward a small amount didn't do as well as the companies that were trying to be bold. Now, you do get some arrows in your back along the way if you're trying to be bold, but I definitely feel that's one lesson. Another lesson learned, very important one, is timing. So I learned from doing so many companies, when I look back on the ones that failed, both my own and others, that timing played a much bigger role than I realized. It played a bigger role than the management team. It played a bigger role than how much money you raise. It played a bigger role than the business model. It played a bigger role than almost everything. And it's timing the market? Yes. It's is the world ready for what you have and is everything in place that you need to succeed? And I'll give you an example. We started a company, an entertainment company, and it was great to listen to Reed Hastings today. We started an entertainment company about the same time he did, trying to be online when he was still mailing disks, and we were too early. Broadband penetration was only about 10%. I signed Chris Rock and Adam Sandler. I'd given them equity in the company.

Wow. We had raised $10 million. It was called Z.com in 2001. And we had great entertainment content, but nobody could watch it. The browser couldn't show it yet. The bandwidth was too slow. People still had dial-up modems. Broadband penetration was too low. And if we only had survived about three or four years, had spent all our money in two years to try and grow faster, But if only we waited until YouTube came out, we would have made it. And we didn't know YouTube was going to come out. And the timing error we made was our product was right. The world was going to do this. We were right on every count. We had the money. We had a great team. I hired people from Disney. Like I said, we got Adam Sandler, Chris Rock. But the world wasn't quite ready yet. Enabling technology. Enabling technology. Yeah, exactly. I started another company that failed called My Life. I had an idea for a watch that would measure your vitals and try and help you predict disease. Yeah. It was 2002. Okay. There was no wearable of any kind.

There was no – people just weren't ready for that. It was too hard to shift the public to that view. It was going to take longer. But take a company like Uber where if that had come out before GPS – now, they didn't invent GPS. They couldn't cause GPS to be on every phone. But they came out after that was there. So that was an example of the technology being in place. And then you can also get lucky on timing. Take the Uber example as well. Uber came out right during the recession. And they needed drivers. And a lot of people were laid off. And it was very inexpensive to recruit drivers. They had a two-sided marketplace. They needed to get riders and drivers. And because they could get drivers so easily, that business took off at the right place at the right time. So sometimes you can't even control things. You get lucky. But what I urge people to do is look at the things that are happening in the world at that moment. And there is everything in place to be ready for your idea. And that, I find, has a much bigger factor than other things I realized. Yeah, that's incredible. Okay, one more. Okay, one more.

The next really big one. You have to have a complementary team. So I didn't learn this until I was 35. I wish I'd learned this sooner. So I started hiring people like me. Very entrepreneurial, big thinkers, always moving to the next thing. always looking for the most exciting thing. I needed more people to balance me. I needed people who are more administrators. On the ground. If you look at four different personality types, there's the E type, the entrepreneur always dreaming. There's the P type, the producer who gets things done, ships a product, sells it. There's the administrator type who keeps the books clear, makes the payroll, makes the rent payments, all that. And there's the integrator type who makes all those people work together. because normally, in the extreme, all those people hate each other's guts. Right, right. So a company is in balance when it has harmony between all those skills and I didn know that And I wasn trying to hire the complementary people to me I was trying to hire people more like me And when I finally learned that it was really really incredible I'll give you a great example of those four different personality types.

Let's say we're in this room here, and we see something on the window over there, like a little scratch on the window. The P-type person would say, there's a scratch on the window. Let's go take care of that right after this meeting. The A-type person would look at that and say, oh, there's something on that window. So, yeah, the administrative person would say, you know, let's write down everything that's wrong. We'll put them in order and we'll tackle each one of them one by one. Okay. The E type person would look at that and say, in that parking lot over there, what are we going to put over there? What new business are we going to start across the street? We wouldn't even see the scratch. We wouldn't see the window. And the I type person would say, I wonder what those three people are thinking. And think about how those four personality styles look at the exact same thing completely differently. and you need all of those in a company. And it's so valuable if you can get that. It's very hard. But if you have harmony like that, you can do unbelievable things because you can see every problem from multiple perspectives. And I really urge companies to do that.

And it's, like I said, it's not easy and I don't even always follow it, but it's really, really valuable. Yeah, if you're starting a company and you're thinking about your co-founding team, right? Yes, yes. Like, apply that framework. Yeah. And understand that there's other people different than you looking at the exact same thing. Seeing something totally different. Totally different. Yeah. So embracing that. Embracing that as opposed to being afraid of that is very valuable. Do you have advice for me as an investor? Like what should I be looking for or what should I be kind of screening out? So I think for success, you need to have unbelievable passion and dedication and stick to it in the face of difficult challenges. Things are going to go wrong. Totally things are going to go wrong. So if you can look for entrepreneurs who have that heart to, they care about the mission so much that they're going to stick with it, even in the bad times. And I think you know that, of course. But the next thing I would say you need to look for at the same time is are they adaptive? Are they willing to change and go with the punches?

Mike Tyson has this great quote, which I think is so funny to bring a Mike Tyson boxing quote to business world. But it's, everybody has a plan. until they get punched in the face. I love that quote. I think that business punches you in the face all the time. Your customers punch you in the face, not literally, metaphorically. They punch you in the face by saying, I don't want to buy that. They punch you in the face by saying, that price is wrong. They punch you in the face by saying, I need that feature. And if you can have an entrepreneur who understands that's life, you're going to get punched in the face all the time. You need to get up, listen to the punch, listen to why you got punched, figure out what to do to adapt to it, And then I say because of that, you need to iterate and evolve. I called it Idea Lab because I love ideas. I called it Idea Lab because I wanted it to be a lab modeled off of Thomas Edison's lab. But I really should have called it Iterate Lab because it really is more about the iteration. You need entrepreneurs who iterate. Every single company of ours that stuck to its exact initial mission probably failed. Every single company that pivoted, maybe not pivoted,

winded its way to success by varying and adjusting and adapting. I think adaptation, and we heard that today. We heard that today on the stage, how much adaptation matters. I really think adjusting. If you're dogmatic with your original idea, I don't think you're going to make it. Yeah. And as an investor, kind of appreciate that the idea might change, right? So it's like, what is the, I guess, like what's the bigger problem that wants to be solved here? And is this the right team that's going to be adaptive and passionate enough to take us there? And you don't want to just shift willy-nilly. You want to keep your original vision and mission in place. It just might be the way you solve it is different. Oh, I've got to give you one more example of that. Yeah. So I started a company called Knowledge Adventure. This was my company before Idealab. I sold it for $90 million in 1995. I started it because I wanted to help kids fall in love with learning. I called it Knowledge Adventure for exactly that reason. I was competing against products, Math Blaster and Reader Rabbit. Those products were skill and drill products. To me, they were boring. They didn't really get kids to fall in love with learning.

but they were killing it in the market. My product wasn't selling, and I couldn't figure out why. And when I went in the stores and watched people pick up my box, this is back in Package Good Software days, 1995. When I picked up my box and put it back down on the CD-ROM software box, I was trying to figure out why is that mom putting it down? I see the kids in her cart at CompUSA. It's perfect for them. My product didn't explain why it was going to benefit them. so I took the exact same product I was making and I repackaged it and told a different story I called it jump start kindergarten give your kids a head start in kindergarten and all of a sudden parents knew if I have a 4 or 5 year old this is the right thing for them then I made jump start first grade for first graders then I made jump start second grade for second graders so I took the same mission I had make kids fall in love with learning but changed the way I told the story about it completely changed the company so that was our adaptation Well, storytelling is also so key. It's crucial. You have to make something that feels inevitable.

Jumpstart kindergarten. Give your kids a head start in kindergarten. That just sounds like the right thing that people want. Idealab.ai. Find an idea for you. It's very important that the idea lands and is logical to someone. The name has to make sense. The whole packaging of everything has to make sense. And we didn't know that. We didn't understand that. I was trying to explain what I wanted to do. Right, right, like the product. Right, right, right, exactly, and not resonate with the mom who was buying the product for their child. What did she want? And she wanted to give my kids a head start, and we finally figured that out. We were lucky to figure that out in time before we ran out of money. Yeah, that's amazing. Okay, I don't know if I've ever told you this, but I want to be you when I grow up. For real. You're already a lot of me. You stayed so humble. Oh, thank you. You're so passionate, and you're a lifelong learner. It is incredible to me. And so I would love for you to share, what is your secret? Like, how do you do that?

How do you stay so excited? Well, you're already doing a lot of it, so don't sell that short. Okay, okay, okay. You're a lifelong learner, too, and you're doing incredible things. I feel like it's back to the knowledge adventure story. I had a fourth-grade teacher that made me fall in love with learning. I don't know what she did. She just made me feel good about myself. She gave me that dopamine or that just great chemical feeling of, wow, I can see something new and that just makes me feel good. I want to give that to other people and I want to keep on feeling that. Like that's really, really exciting. So I am a lifelong learner. Like every time someone can teach me something new, I am thrilled. Like I am so grateful when someone teaches me something I didn't know. And even when they course correct me, I say, thank you. Like that's the greatest gift. So I try to give that to as many people as I can. but you can see I'm excited about it myself. Yeah, but you do it with so much humility and grace. It's really awesome. Oh, thank you so much. Yeah, thank you so much for joining us today. That was really wonderful. Thank you so much. I personally can't wait to see what businesses get launched out of IdeaLaptop.ai.

I know it's going to be transformative. Bill also gave a really dynamic direct address at the Masters of Scale Summit in San Francisco. You can find that on the Masters of Scale YouTube channel. Thank you so much for joining me. I'll be back next week with a new episode. Pioneers of AI is a Wait What original. Our executive producer is Eve Trow. Our lead producer is Alan Montecilio. Video editing by Eric Purcell. Our senior talent executive is Stephanie Stern. Mixing and mastering by Brian Pugh. Original music by Ryan Holiday. You can join the conversation on LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, and X. Just search for Ad Pioneers of AI.

Thank you.