dive into the stories behind your why.
I think I would love to hear some of those stories
that pertains to your why.
They may be inspired you,
maybe changed your trajectory,
maybe help you help someone else.
I think I'd love to hear those stories for you.
Okay.
You want me to dive in?
Yeah, go ahead.
So I think of my business life as a pre and post.
And what I mean by that is pre working for Steve Jobs
and post because the work I did for Steve
and our interactions really changed a lot
the way I'm thinking about businesses
and customers and products.
Before Steve, I was a kind of a younger,
naive in a way, entrepreneur, made a lot of mistakes.
I still made a lot of mistakes after Steve, by the way,
that didn't go away.
But I was, one thing that I always was interested
in the business is people and meaning people
and hearing their stories.
As you may know, I was doing research in physics.
It is a very lonely job.
There were maybe 40 people around the world
who truly understood what I was working on
because it was a very deep, narrow groove.
And I missed meaning people and interacting
and hearing that different stories.
So I always wanted to go into business for that reason
and just use my physics background as a way
to look at business as a different way
to look at business that most people have.
And I started the company, I sold it probably too early.
I was young again.
And then I worked at Apple
and at Apple we did really, really great jobs.
I mean, it was very difficult
because Apple was in trouble at the time,
but I learned a lot.
And then after Apple, I became a venture capitalist.
So kind of one on the dark side
and really on the other side of the table and said,
okay, now I'm gonna write checks
and try to help entrepreneurs.
And that gave me a very different perspective.
He also helped me understood
that I wasn't in charge anymore.
I wasn't a CEO anymore.
And my job at best was to be a good diplomat
to try to make the CEO take my ideas
and believe that he was their own ideas and implement them.
So very, very different skill set for sure.
And then a lot more diplomatic role
interacting with other board members
and other investors who have different views
of the companies and different agendas,
depending on what they are in their life cycles
in their funds.
I thought that was really interesting.
But the thing that didn't really work well for me
is that my influence as a board member
wasn't as deep as I wanted it to be.
And on the other hand, I didn't wanna go to the extreme
which is being a CEO again.
And so when I founded BlueDots 10 years ago,
I found a really good balance
which is we're in the business of giving advice to CEOs
and helping them grow.
And we do that through a data-driven approach.
So it's not like what we think or guessing.
And whether they implement the advice or not
is really up to them.
And it's really equivalent to being a doctor
where we have an X-ray machine and an MRI machine
and a blood work machine.
We can diagnose exactly what the issues are.
And then we give them the prescription
and then they decide to go and buy the meds and take them
or they decide not to do it.
And that's perfectly fine with us.
So that's kind of the difference between my life before
and my life after working with the jobs.
Wow, that is fascinating.
Oh man, oh, what money I would have paid at that time, right?
If I knew like, oh, what Steve Jobs could teach people.
So what would you say in that case,
what is one lesson that you learned from Steve Jobs
post and pre and post that you carry to this day
that has made the most impact in your life?
Yeah, I mean, I think there are three big lessons
I learned from Steve.
One is that don't be focused, but be hyper-focused.
I mean, Steve Jobs was the most focused person,
business person I have ever met.
And one day I was asking him, I said, Steve,
why aren't you on 60 minutes and talking to
all those magazines and all that.
And he looked at me like I was stupid and basically he said,
do you think those guys could help me design
the next best product on the planet?
And I'm like, no, I don't think so.
And so, well, that's why I don't waste my time with them.
So very, very focused.
That's the first lesson.
The second one is that simplicity,
which is the success of Apple,
which is the core reason Apple is so successful
is really, really hard.
It's very hard to take a complex system
or complex user interface product
and make it so intuitive and so trivial.
And that process to shed the complexity, if you will,
is a very tricky and difficult problem.
That's probably the second lesson.
And then the third one I learned was that
there is one and only one business on this planet
that everybody's in the exact same business.
There are no millions of businesses
or hundreds of thousands of businesses, there's only one.
And that unique business is the manufacturing
and delivery of Delight.
We are all in the business of delighting our customer
and setting that expectation right
and delivering on that expectation is really critical.
You cannot have an impedance mismatch
between the delight your customers expect
and what they actually receive.
And Apple is all about that.
And I think, you know, if you think of it, these terms,
under those terms, you realize that what you do
is almost less important than setting up that delight level
and then delivering on it.
Wow.
Thank you for sharing that.
My gosh, there's a being focused and hyper-focused.
Wow.
I think a lot of times entrepreneurs leaders
are guilty of saying yes to too many things
and not saying no enough.
So I think that's a very, very great lesson.
The other thing, the simplicity part.
Oh my gosh.
You know, how many times I've had debates
and talks to people about iPhone versus
Android and there's only certain level
I can go with people and figure it's not about
what's better and what's not.
To me, and I think not maybe not a lot of people
see it that way.
I figured that Apple spends so much money
and effort onto making someone's life simple
using that phone.
They wanted to eliminate any other reason possible.
Like I don't want to use five fingers.
I only want to use one thumb.
Right.
Exactly.
And making the interface easier and simpler to understand
and even my grandma can do it.
And I think that was one of the very important goal
on Apple.
So they've done a very, very good job in their interfaces.
I mean, Android can provide a lot of apps and other things,
but I don't think Apple tops the simplicity.
The other part, delight.
Oh my gosh, there's a reason that McDonald's,
the biggest fastest chain company in the world
has a mascot as a joker on McDonald's.
Yeah, so because they're selling happiness.
They're not focused on burgers.
Starbucks does that pretty well.
Through their way.
Apple does that pretty well through their ways.
So those are very, very impactful lessons.
I hope people see what you've shared with us today, Fuli.
That was amazing.
Thank you.
And again, it's about the experience.
This is not about the product.
It's about making people feel a certain way.
It's this emotional connection with the product,
but it's not the product itself.
Yeah, wow, that's awesome.
I wanna take a next step onto your part,
your vision and blue dots.
Where are you going with that company, with the book
and your vision?
Where do you see it going the next few years?
Five, 10, 15, 20 years if you'd forecast it.
Well, we've been blessed.
We studied, John and I, my partner,
studied blue dots in 2014, 10 years ago.
With a very simple vision is we want to help entrepreneurs
and CEOs to grow their business.
Because I don't know any other definition
of success than growth.
And I always tell our CEOs, the CEOs we work with,
our job is to make you shine.
And what we mean by that is if you go to your boards
or investors or family and you show consistent growth,
then you will be defined as a great CEO.
And the problem is growth is really hard.
It's like being a good parent.
It's really, really hard.
There's no real books.
And so we wanted to find a new way to look at that problem.
And that's how we invented those four axes of alignment
and the methodology that we use and the data driven approach,
which has been very, very successful.
And not because we're smart, but because it's common sense.
And our vision is to continue to deliver
really high value growth to entrepreneurs and CEOs
and business leaders and continue to build
amazing companies and help them do that.
That's awesome.
Do you have a retirement age for yourself
or do you work until the day you die?
I don't know how to spell retirement.
And everybody I know who took retirement regretted it.
So I was talking to Marco Landi.
He actually turned 80 years old last year.
And he was telling, he was the CEO of Apple
after, during Gil Amelio before Steve.
And he was telling me, and Marco is an amazing person.
He's Italian, he has a lot of energy.
And he was telling me, he said,
you know, I retired for about 10 days.
I played golf every day and then I got bored.
So, I mean, I don't think of what we do at Blue Dots
as work, we're here to help people.
And it's very gratifying to actually see those companies
grow and be successful.
And we just love what we do.
So I never think about that word retirement.
I don't have any notion of what it means.
I have no concept about it.
I just love what we're doing.
And we're just gonna continue to do it as long as we can.
That's awesome.
I wanna take a page from your book.
And this gets literally take a page from your book.
I was going through this.
So the five stages of company growth through revenue
that you came up with, this is very interesting to me.
I've never seen something like this before.
I've seen forecasted about this before.
Where did you come from this?
How did you got this information together?
What was the basis behind it?
And I'd love to dive deep into these stages.
Yeah, I mean, it's a good question.
I think that, I've been on 23 boards
and I always think of companies like children.
And I'm blessed I have two kids.
And what I observed is that every company
literally is like a child.
They are different, they have different characters.
They have different DNA.
They are going after different markets.
They have different products, different business models
and so on and so forth.
And that's why the challenge of growth is so difficult.
It's just exactly the same as the challenge of parenting.
So what worked for our son didn't necessarily work
for our daughter, even though it's the same family,
same concept, same principles.
And when I go from one board meeting and another,
I used to say, well, we did this and that company,
I just had a board meeting last weekend,
it worked really well.
And it's like, for some reason,
it's a total failure on that company.
So I always thought of companies and startup as kids,
children, you love them, you want them to be successful
and you'll do everything I can as a board member
to make them successful.
And then I was realizing that it's like,
well, how old is a company?
And I found this rule of three X,
you multiply by three the age of the company,
and then you have the equivalent age of the human being.
So if you go public, typically you would go public
after six, seven, eight years.
So only multiply by three is 21 years old,
which is the age you can legally drink in this country.
And going public is like, you're now an adult,
you're a naked out there and you can't screw up
because everybody's watching you.
So it worked out really well.
And then I meet with an entrepreneur and I said,
well, when did you start a company?
Well, three years ago, I said,
okay, well, you're a nine-year-old kid.
And they're always surprised.
And I said, you're running the marathon
and you've done five miles, which is great,
but you still have a long way to go.
So I think the rule of three is actually pretty interesting
and works in general, you know, pretty well.
Thank you for being here today.
I'm really happy that you tuned in to Vision Pros Live.
I'm looking forward to seeing your reactions
as these episodes continue to move forward.
This is gonna get more and more fun.
We'll have more and more engagement as well.
We'll invite people to participate in the show.
And thank you for giving us your time and attention.
Have an excellent time building out your vision
and becoming a Vision Pro yourself.