OP: What is your definition of an entrepeneur? 

 

TC: I can share this thing that I call the ten- second MBA. I came up with it because a lot of people want to be entrepreneurs, and they feel like “Oh, it’s so difficult” or “Oh, there are so many things to learn.”

The ten-second MBA is:

 

STEP ONE: Do anything that improves people’s lives in any kind of meaningful way; it could be one person, it could be ten people, it doesn’t really matter.

 

STEP TWO: Make Step One cash-flow- positive; that is, make more money in one month than it costs you to do it.

That’s pretty much all they teach you in MBA school, condensed down to ten seconds. An entrepreneur is someone that fundamentally gets that. They get that business is not about the resources that you have, it’s not about a particular type of strategic framework, it’s not about following specific rules in a book. Entrepreneurship is about seeing the opportunity to improve people’s lives in a meaningful way, which is Step One, and then doing that in a way that can self-sustain, which is Step Two. 

 

OP: I have a sort of controversial question, and I get a lot of different feedback, depending on whether I ask men or women. I’ve actually been asked to leave this question out of interviews before. The question is, “Would you give men and women different advice? Why or why not?” How would you interpret that question? Would your advice differ between men and women, and not just in tech but in any industry?

 

TC: The “right advice” is the right advice for that specific person. When it comes to men and women, person

by person, there might be a woman whose upbringing or way of being is much closer to men that I’ve worked with. In which case I might give her exactly the same [advice] I’d give to other men, and vice versa. There might be a man whose upbringing and perspective is much closer to, societally, what women are facing.

 

The point of advice is not absolute truth. It’s to serve the people you are speaking to the best. Society puts different challenges on men and women. I don’t think that there is fundamentally any difference of potential, any gender difference that would hold somebody back. But I do believe society imposes on what we believe in a particular way. Because of that, men and women are treated differently in society, as a broad average. As I start talking to a woman or to a man, I might find that their upbringing or their allegiance to society is quite different; therefore, that element will be important to bring into the mix. 

 

OP: I think there’s this idea, especially in the tech industry, that competition breeds innovation. What’s your take on this? 

 

TC: There’s an idea called “co-opetition,” which is the combination of competition and cooperation. I think that co-opetition is much closer to how all innovative systems and adaptive systems work. In nature there’s

a famous phrase, “survival of the fittest,” but it’s very incomplete if you understand that the diversity of organisms all contribute to each other. For example, if you bring wolves back to an ecosystem and they manage a deer population, then the plants actually do better. When you look at it like that, in a way the wolves are actually cooperating with the plants. I think an unbridled belief in competition and turning a blind eye to all the cooperation that exists in an ecosystem—natural ecosystems, a business ecosystem—it’s just an incomplete viewpoint. A lot of times, we use the excuse of competition in order to allow ourselves to be less than human, to be less than present or compassionate to the possibility that competition and cooperation can co-exist in a space that adds up to much more than just one of them alone. 

 

OP: Wow. OK, this is a less serious question. I feel like I’m one of the few who’s had the grand fortune of witnessing you on a dance floor. Could you fill us in on your extracurricular endeavors? 

 

TC: I really enjoy dancing. The reason I enjoy it is because I was a musician for a really long time; being a musician is really helpful because a lot of times, I solve problems via musical analogy. In life and in technology and other spheres. It’s a thread that’s run all throughout my life that’s helped me make sense of things. A lot of times when I have a really difficult problem that I’m solving, I’ll go in front of a piano and try to make the same sound as what my brain feels like at that moment. By hearing the sound, it allows me to solve the problem through sound. When I hear music, I hear a lot of different layers. I’ve been in a dozen bands and produced a bunch of albums; because of it, when I hear a song I’ll hear all the different layers that are happening at the same time that allow that music to exist. When I dance I just kind of respond to all those different layers with my body. I’m terrible at dancing the “right” way. If you want me to do ballroom dancing, I’m pretty bad at it. [Laughs.]

 

OP: What advice can you offer millennials?

 

TC: I think one of the best things they can do is get directly engaged. We have a convenience culture where a cause comes up, and it’s like, “Oh, I totally liked that page and I sent them five dollars.”

 

To me, that’s not quite engagement. Engage- ment really gives up a piece of you, but ultimately it doesn’t feel like that. When you give up a piece of yourself to something that deeply matters to you, it gives back a thousand times over. Maybe not immediately, maybe not for ten years. I kind of feel like the Millennials I’ve been around have this deep sensibility; they have this desire to go do that. To me, the way that they can give back is just to act on that, to move beyond the virtual nudging of an idea. As much as I’m a technologist, that’s not how the world changes. The world changes not by drive-by cheering; it comes from people being able to step forward and give a piece of themselves for something that matters.