ESYB2 133 - What Are Moonshots
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[00:00:00] In this video, I want to talk about the idea of moonshots. What are moonshots? Moonshots are giant risks you might take or giant attempts you might make that, if they work, and typically moonshots, They're unlikely to work, but if they work out, you'll go to the moon, right? So think about that for your business.

What does that mean for your business to skyrocket and get to the moon? Something amazing and tremendous. It requires innovation. Innovation, of course, carries with it risk. How do you balance the two? Let's talk about that in this video. So, first of all, typical technology investors or investors who invest in innovation, They want moonshots.

They only invest in moonshots. Because, let's say they invest in like 10 companies, they kind of know that only 2 or 1 or 3 of those companies will succeed. So they need to have tremendous returns because most companies will [00:01:00] fail. They'll have a lot of, many losses. It's priced in. But they need at least one giant one.

They need one Uber or one Airbnb or one Google, like one something huge, right? That's the dream of an investor. And so they only really invest in those. Now, if you have a restaurant and you have a restaurant investor, they work in different ways because restaurants, you can't really make one restaurant go to the moon and make billions of dollars.

It just doesn't work like that in some industries. You can have a chain, sure, but most restaurants Don't intend to be a chain, etc. So, but in startups and innovative products, moonshots are all the rage. Now, of course, moonshots are great, and you want to devote at least some of your resources to moonshot thinking, moonshot pursuit.

Of course, if you only do moonshots as [00:02:00] the entrepreneur, Most likely you're going to be poor for the majority or all of your life because as we mentioned most moonshots fail. So how do you balance the two? In a company or by yourself, what you want to do is have some practical work that pays the bills.

Like let's say you're Google. Google has dozens of moonshot crazy projects that are super secretive. We don't know about them. Like buying gigantic Ships and putting servers on them and creating these like server, uh, farms or really crazy out of the, like, out of the norm ideas that we wouldn't even think about.

And they innovate in just about every field of technology that's coming around. Most of those innovations fail. Sometimes they out, they buy new companies that innovate and they disrupt and they buy them and use the technology internally and use the talent that they buy, right? The, the engineers [00:03:00] and the scientists come to Google and make Google better.

So that's Google. But Google has a way to pay the bills. Their ad system is how they earn the majority of their money. And as long as that's running, right, that's the people who The people who are in charge of working on keeping the ad system running, which is how Google makes most of its money, they are not moonshot people.

They are not taking too many risks. They are super careful. They need to keep that working and maybe fend off some competitors here and there, improve incrementally, but no moonshots too much because this thing is great. But also moonshots. Same with you. You can devote, if you're a one person company, devote a little bit of You know, mental, mental space and efforts to big ideas, but mostly you need to get to the point where you can pay the bills.

If you are at a point where, let's say, you're paying the bills and it's fine, and you can start to open up time for moonshots, like in, like, one day a week you can work [00:04:00] on something really cool, or you can hire an engineer to work on your moonshots, and as your business grows and you're able to afford more, you hire a team of engineers.

And they're working on your moonshot project, and then you're hiring marketers, and suddenly you have a whole other company or something like that. Or you're doing that within a company. But that's how you balance not being reckless because only doing moonshots and only pursuing moonshots is reckless a little bit.

It's for some people, like young people, people who don't have to support a family, it's great for them. But as you have a family, as you grow up, you kind of need to make an income at some point. So, same with mid sized companies, same with large companies. And so with midsize and large companies, sometimes there are many very famous cases where actually the innovative team is literally physically moved from the teams that are the teams that just keep the boat moving forward, right?

So the people who are just, you know, the organized teams who make [00:05:00] incremental changes, they're still talented, they're still great, but they're not the moonshot people. They have a different office, and the moonshot people, they're in a different office. Only working together, like kind of innovating, being creative, failing, but learning from the failures and they're actually separated very often.

But that's how you balance the must have of like, you need the moonshots, but also you gotta pay rent and bills and all this, and that's the balance of the two without forgetting either.

