My 2045 ambition for the organization, as I see it right now. I would like us to employ at least 10 million people, through the businesses that we own. I would like our businesses to positively affect at least a quarter of the world’s population. I would like us to have made, cumulatively, about a trillion dollars. That’s my 2045 ambition.
If we do that, we are the modern face of capitalism, for the next 50 years. So how we do that now becomes really important. If you think about building businesses today that can do any of those three things, you have to be technological. You are not going to build a brick-and-mortar business that gets close to any of those three things.
You have to think very broadly about building things that can stand the test of time. Those businesses are by definition hard and non-obvious. And so they compound in scale very slowly. That’s really counterintuitive to the overriding logic of Silicon Valley which says, “Quick, fast, go.” That kind of premature ejaculation doesn’t work if you’re trying to be around forever. You’ve got to be in the flow, for decades. That is hard. It tests peoples’ patience, resolve, and everybody’s really intellectual incision.
And this is where everybody gives up.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PMotykw0SIk (12:10)