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Welcome to the bonus episode of The Future of Food, Energy, and Space.
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After Tony individually interviewed the four business leaders solving major global issues, he did a roundtable discussion to really dig into the opportunity that he and they all see in these massive markets like energy, agriculture, and space.
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Because these solutions aren t coming from governments or NGOs.
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They re ideated and executed by businesses.
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What s fascinating to us in this episode is how you ll hear these entrepreneurs not just talk about their solutions and their companies, but how what they re really doing is opening up these markets by proving the opportunity in them and encouraging other startups to join them in the race.
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They welcome competition because in the end, it benefits everyone and improves the quality of life across generations and continents.
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So listen carefully because if you re an entrepreneur looking for a wide open space to put your talents and energy into, you just might find one today.
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Here s Tony.
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Welcome everybody to the Tony Robbins podcast.
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I m really excited for today because you re going to meet four extraordinary human beings that are world-changing technology experts, founders of companies, CEOs and founders that are putting together companies that aren t just ideas.
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They re right now moving forward and they re beginning to do things that literally can change the lives of billions of people.
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So let me introduce our panel.
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The first person here is my dear friend, Bill Gross.
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He founded a company called Ideal Labs, which started in 1996.
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It s the longest running technology incubator in history.
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Next, Jason Green is the CEO and co-founder of a place called Upward Farms.
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And now he s building these vertical aquaponic sustainable farms for leafy greens and fish.
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And then thirdly, we have here Mikhail Kokerich.
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And Mikhail is, he built the first private space company, you know, in Russia.
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sold that company at a very young age, decided he wanted to come to America, and he wants to power humanity into the solar system.
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And then finally, my dear friend and my partner, and that s Dakin Sloss.
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Dakin is the founder, and he s the general partner of Prime Movers Lab.
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They invest in breakthrough scientific startups, and they re really obsessed with finding what they call Prime Movers, which is people that are inventors of technology that can transform billions of people s lives.
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And I think we ll start with you, Bill.
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You ve got all these companies, hundreds of companies, but you ve never been, I m aware of anyway, in recent times, CEO, and you re the CEO of Heliogen.
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So tell us, what does it mean to you personally?
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Why are you involved in it to this level of depth?
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Were you even the CEO?
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And what can the impact be?
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What s the size of the impact it can have on the industrial heat market and therefore the world?
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I really feel that low cost energy
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can help all of humankind in every powerful way, as we said earlier.
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Education, freedom, equality, justice, pollution, it just solves so many problems.
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I feel like if there s one thing I can work on for the rest of my life that uses my intelligence and my passion, my mechanical engineering background, my science, my organizational skills, I want to take everything I learned from all these businesses
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and apply it personally to this area.
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I ve stepped in as CEO.
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I run the company on a daily basis, building the team, going after this, because I just think it s the biggest, most impactful thing I could do.
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It s the most intellectually challenging, and it s hard.
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I feel like I m learning something every day.
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My passion for learning is met by this company, because it s a very, very hard problem.
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So I hope we can make a big impact.
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I know we ll make a big impact.
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And it s just a matter of how long it will take.
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Well, Bill Gates is now one of your backers.
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What s the size of the impact?
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And what s the size of the market for this company?
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Well, yeah, so listen to how big this is.
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It s almost silly.
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The global GDP is $86 trillion a year.
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Of that $86 trillion, 10% is energy.
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So $8.6 trillion a year is spent on energy.
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Of that $8.6 trillion, 81% is coal, oil, and gas, so $7 trillion a year.
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$7 trillion a year is coal, oil, and gas.
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I want to replace all of coal, oil, and gas, so I m going after $7 trillion.
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I want to replace all of coal, oil, and gas with concentrated sunshine.
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I think we can do that.
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It s going to take us a couple decades, but I want to go do that, and it s probably the biggest business possible.
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It s not $7 trillion market cap, it s $7 trillion revenues possible.
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It s the biggest business there could be.
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Now, we re not going to get all that to ourselves.
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I don t even care about getting all.
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What I mostly want to do, if I can pull this off, I would be very happy.
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I want to do what Elon did with electric cars.
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I want to show that this is possible.
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I want to show and get more people to come after this market.
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Elon is doing incredible with what he did with Tesla alone, but look what he s doing with getting every other car company to follow.
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I want to do the same thing in this area.
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I want to make a successful company.
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I want to make a great return for investors, but I want to show other people, you should go after this market.
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It s a very, very lucrative market.
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Awesome.
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Thank you, brother.
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Let s pop over to you, Jason.
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Tell me about Upward Farms.
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How can Upward Farms improve billions of lives?
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Tell us what that vision is.
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What we talk about at Upward Farms is how we re accelerating the world s transition to regenerative agriculture.
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That s a bold claim for a vertical farm to make.
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It perhaps ties back to my comments about
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how I think great companies have this infinitely scalable vision, but this very clear market opportunity.
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The very clear market opportunity for us is first products that we ve offered for retail is a washed and ready to eat packaged salad, which is in fact, the most attractive slice of the American produce aisle.
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Packaged salad is the number one driver of organic produce sales.
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you see organic packaged or packaged out broadly in 87% of US households.
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And so it s a great opportunity to build a brand, very clear market opportunity and leafy greens in the US are $11 billion.
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But global agri-food is an $8 trillion market.
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So getting to the numbers that Bill s talking about here, the entire food supply chain is worth $8 trillion.
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So how do we accelerate the world s transition to regenerative agriculture?
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Well, you look at where food comes from.
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Food is soil.
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And 40% of the world s agricultural soils have been lost.
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The remaining agricultural soils are being lost at up to 40 times replacement
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the single biggest threat to the food supply is actually that we ve mined, you know, Bill was talking about fossil fuels, right?
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Mining the earth for energy.
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We ve mined the earth for all of our food.
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So what our long-term vision is and the way that we change billions of lives is by actually starting to rebuild soil.
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And so all the things that we re doing that are extraordinary about how we grow, that improve quality,
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and sustainability and the cost, all that comes from this fundamental technology of how plants, animals, and microbes have co-evolved in nature, tapping into all of the genetics that are already in there that can drive incredible traits, whether that s a more delicious product or disease resistance or higher yields.
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All of the genetics that we need are already out there in nature.
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We re creating the environment, which is the background that I come from.
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We re creating the environment that drives that biology.
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But then we think about, how do we get this back to the broad acre?
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How do we become a tool for farmers?
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And that kind of, I think I look good at indoor agriculture and vertical farming as with the question of where are we in the market cycle?
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You look at markets broadly and markets initially begin to build enterprise value in content.
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You look at where was the value in entertainment?
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It was studios.
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Where is the value in entertainment now in a mature ecosystem?
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It s in distribution.
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Netflix, although Netflix is a studio as well.
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You start in content and markets as they mature, evolve to distribution.
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You see that across information technology, Rob.
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Well, what does that mean for indoor farms?
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are indoor farms going to be in the content creation business forever?
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Are you going to be a grower of leafy greens today, tomatoes tomorrow, fish next week?
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Is that the end all, be all that you re the one actually growing the product?
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And I think
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No.
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What s the opportunity to actually become the distribution platform?
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Where do you develop intellectual property on which you can get leverage?
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And that, I think, all the things that we re learning about, how do we build great soil indoors?
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How do we drive fertility indoors to drive productivity and all the things that we re growing?
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Well, what if we did that outdoors?
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What if we rebuilt
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the 40% of the world s agricultural soils that have been lost to Bill s focus on carbon capture, soil is in fact, the number one store of carbon globally.
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And so, you know, that to us is how we change billions of lives.
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That s how we have this infinitely scalable vision is we are focused on a technology that s fundamentally built on natural laws that built on all of these genetics that have been developed through evolution over billions of years.
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We humbly try to learn from them and we try to put them to work indoors today to grow a better ecosystem
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to grow better food.
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But over the long term, we ask ourselves, can we actually take this back out to land to the broad acre and start rebuilding the world s fertility?
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That s brilliant.
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So, you know, so many people are worried and they study about the amount of topsoil that s lost and that s literally life on this planet.
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What you re saying is we can rebuild it indoors and then take it outdoors.
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So why do I want my produce to be grown indoors at least now instead of outdoors?
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And why would I want it done by upward farms?
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So why you would want your product grown indoors is really about the quality of the product and the quality in so many ways, whether it s the freshness.
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Tony, you highlighted that we re growing locally and the ambition to be locally globally is really what indoor farms offer.
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And freshness is everything in produce.
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You lose all of the flavor, all of the nutrition, all of the texture in the trip from farm to table.
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We want to improve value.
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A third of the retail dollar is lost in transportation and waste.
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Packaged salad is in fact, or leafy greens broadly, are today the most dangerous food in America.
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They account for a quarter of all cases of foodborne illness.
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And by all means, eat your vegetables.
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Like, you know, don t let me deter you from eating your vegetables, like tons of vegetables.
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And there s the opportunity to improve safety.
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You see this in these recurrent romaine, for example, or other leafy green recalls.
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And so there is the opportunity to increase safety.
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E. coli being one of those that people are most commonly familiar with?
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Yeah.
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E. coli is probably the most common pathogen in leafy greens.
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You see recalls across a variety of different pathogens.
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E. coli is pretty notorious.
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The reason that you want your product to be grown by us is we are offering a far superior product
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at a more accessible price point than has ever been offered.
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And we think the value proposition should be as simple as that, better quality, better price.
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Why do we need to change?
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You ve touched on it, but could you give us a little deeper idea?
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Why do we need to change our food growing processes?
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What s it going to mean to generations in the future?
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And can you describe like how, when you say vertical farms, how tall are these buildings?
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I mean, people want to get a picture in their mind, I m sure.
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Yeah.
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Yeah, so I guess when you ask why does this matter to future generations, the picture in my head is that scene from The Matrix when they re all eating that protein slop.
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You see the food of the future.
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I think earlier in where we were in the tech market cycle, you saw Soylent.
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You know, is that what you, is that what you want?
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Like the idea that all of your, all of the joy has been taken out of your food and that you, you know, you re going to drink this.
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And I, and I don t, I m not going to tell anybody else how to eat.
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Right.
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Like if you, if you want to eat a high protein, you know, like vitamin mix in your, in your shake or in your bar, like if you, if that s what you want to eat by all means.
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But I personally think that there s a tremendous amount of joy to be had in a good meal, in sharing a good meal.
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I really celebrate food.
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That s the question.
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It s like, who do we want to be?
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What do we want our children to eat?
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And I love sharing these extraordinary meals with my young son and introducing him to things that I find delicious.
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And so that s, I think, what it means.
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I think there s the real sustainability question.
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Agriculture is one of the largest drivers of carbon emissions.
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There are lots of things that need to improve there.
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And you ve highlighted, Tony, in your work in this conversation, food insecurity.
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So to really pull it all together, I do think that
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creating a more delicious food market that is more affordable, that can either survive a changing climate or be one that mitigates climate change, no matter which way you slice it.
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Indoor agriculture has a critical role in that resiliency plan, as well as in your mitigation strategy.
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Tell me, what s upcoming for Upward Farms?
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What do you guys have coming out?
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Are you selling fish yet and so forth?
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And just to finish up, would you give people a sense of what does it look like, a vertical farm?
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We ve seen pictures of skyscrapers and cities where they re gonna grow these up, but none of those pragmatically I ve seen happen.
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What does it really look like in reality and what s upcoming for you guys to finish up?
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Yeah, so imagine like conceptually if Willy Wonka and planet Earth kind of got together and made some magic, made some beautiful farm babies.
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That s like picture in your head.
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What this looks like is so we run an aquaponic farm.
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So we are farming, we re farming fish, we re farming plants, we re farming microbes in a variety of ways that help our plants, our fish, that help us to create a more sustainable and high quality production process.
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So we have one area of the farm where we re farming fish, and this is sustainable, high quality, it is mercury-free, hormone-free, antibiotic-free, all the things that you want, absolute highest quality product.
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happens on one side of the facility.
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Then once we process the waste, on the other side of the facility, we have the vertical farming system of the plants.
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That looks like if you can imagine an industrial racking system like you d see at a Home Depot or Costco, you ve got these many tiers with automation that moves all of the plants through the growing process, so automated
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seeding, harvesting, washing, drying, packaging, labeling, and plants or, you know, the things that become plants kind of flowing through that whole process.
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And so on terms of where... Is that where some of the technology, the efficiencies you ve gotten that have made you be able to do this cost effective where other people have not been able to?
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Yeah, so there are really two classes of IP that we ve developed.
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There s IP combination of patents and trade secrets around the biology.
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So we ve developed certain things that help us to grow better plants, that help us to create better microbiology around the roots to create disease resistance, drive higher yields, improve the nutrition of the product.
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There s a mixture of patents and trade secrets there.
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And then there s a whole bunch of automation.
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that we ve developed.
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And our goal is to make that automation, because if you think about food, the volumes of product that you need to move at really low cost is extraordinary.
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And a lot of the approaches that you ve seen in indoor agriculture are actually adapting systems that you see more in automotive manufacturing.
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where you re moving these very high value products, right?
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You re moving these individual products that are worth $30,000.
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And instead, we think that the approaches need to be focused on, how can I move as big a batch as possible for as low cost as possible?
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And so we ve developed a portfolio of
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of IP around the automation where we re actually able to move plants through this growing process with 98% fewer moving parts and 50% lower cost to build than other vertical farms.
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And so, yes, there s a lot of IP there.
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And all of that is in service of building a more scalable, more affordable production process.
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And what do you have coming up now, just to finish up, and do you sell fish yet, or are you still leafy greens?
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And I understand, is it correct, about 90% of all leafy greens in the US come from the West Coast, so distribution s kind of interesting.
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You d be able to create local distribution, but I m curious to know what you re delivering now and what s coming.
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So it s true.
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In fact, it s 95% of leafy greens are grown in California and Arizona.
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It s really coming out of two counties.
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It s Salinas, California and Yuma, Arizona.
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On the one hand, incredible production model.
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And on the other hand, it means that it s very hard to get a local salad.
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Same thing with fish.
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90% of American seafood is imported.
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And in fact, imported fish is the most mistrusted food in America.
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In terms of where we are today, so we are just about to open what we re calling our HQ farm or headquarters farm in Greenpoint, Brooklyn.
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It is about a 20x expansion in capacity over our previous facility.
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and fully automated like I mentioned seeding plant movement harvesting washing drying packaging labeling kind of end to end.
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This to us is kind of a demonstration of the, the, the power of vertical farming the power of.
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fully automated aquaponic process.
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On the one hand, it s this very elegant ecosystem tapping into millions of years of evolution.
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And on the other hand, it s very precise automated process that allows us to deliver consistent product at an affordable price.
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That s wonderful.
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Well, Brooklyn is not the first place that most of us think of as a place for farms.
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So you re really proving what s possible, brother.
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Thank you, Jason.
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OK, we re almost done.
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Mikhail, I d love to go a little deeper with Momentus with you.
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I ve heard you describe it as like last mile in the space delivery, space charter service, space shuttle service.
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You ve got this incredible efficiency with this water propellant.
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It s three times cheaper, it s faster as I understand it, it s lower cost, it s sustainable, it s safe.
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Tell us just a little bit more about where Momentus is today, what it s actually doing, and what s coming right now, because I know you re about to make some significant moves.
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Yes, thank you.
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I think you grasped the idea very precisely.
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I mean, we re really providing this in a very efficient manner last mile delivery.
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in space.
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And the reason why you need to have something like Momentus now is very simple.
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Again, look at 10 years ago.
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So it was 70 satellites launched to space with basically 70 rockets.
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So every satellite had their own rockets.
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And why it was so?
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Because satellites was larger.
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People were building like satellites with multi tons.
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And majority of the satellites was using
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you know, like big instruments to provide communication or TV signal or a lot of cameras.
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And rockets actually was also smaller than now.
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And now we have these big rockets, even Falcon 9 is three times larger than Soyuz, which have been the working horse of the past.
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But satellites becoming smaller because all this progress with electronics and new applications drive the size of the satellites much smaller.
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So it used to be several tons, now the average size of 100 kilograms.
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It s actually the size of the man.
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And now you have like this big rockets that can deliver very cheap, but you have so many small satellites.
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And you finally need to put like a constellation of the satellites to put on a very specific orbit.
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If you want to cover the earth, for example, and make image in several times a day, or if you want to collect data about like moisture content or about like the humidity or weather or any type of applications, you need multiple orbits and multiple satellites on each orbit.
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So, and this was the reason why people start to build a small rockets, which kind of one of the answer to the problem, but small rockets are like a small private jets.
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So you can fly fast, but it s expensive.
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It s a order of magnitude, two times order of magnitude, 100 times more expensive than big rockets.
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So how people solve this problem on ground here?
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On the ground, we almost have any logistics that we can imagine.
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It s a multi-model.
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For example, FedEx, it s planes and trucks.
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Or if you deliver containers, it s like the big ship and the truck that deliver container.
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Or if you have the planes, we have this long-haul planes and the hopper flights for hub-and-spoke model.
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And now it s just time to apply the same approach to space.
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It sounds like a simple, but it s actually hard because even it sounds like a last mile delivery, but in space, you measure distances, not in the miles, you measure distances in the kind of energy, because to change one orbit to another, you need basically to change the velocity.
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And this change of velocity can be pretty dramatic.
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Just to give you an example, if you launch something to the orbit of International Space Station and want to change the orbital inclination to the polar orbit, you need to push the same amount of energy like to fly to the moon.
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Really?
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To just make that one change in the orbit as much energy as they go to the moon?
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Yes.
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Yes.
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Because you are flying with eight kilometers per second.
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And let s try to shift direction of something that flying with eight kilometers per second.
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It s hard.
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It s hard.
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How much per second?
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Eight kilometers per second.
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And what is that in miles?
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Just so people translate or... Ah, it s like five miles per second.
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It s also fast.
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Five miles per second.
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Oh, wow.
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Yeah.
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So you need to have a lot of energy.
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So, and we basically, what we are doing actually like a bill where you use solar energy.
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So, but we are using the solar energy.
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and use this energy to change the orbits.
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So basically, we have solar electrical propulsion.
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So we collect this energy, and then we turn this energy into thermal energy.
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We heat like our propellant, which kind of, it s not a fuel anymore, it s a propellant.
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And as a propellant, we use water.
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And we heat it up to very high temperature in a small microwave oven, like in the kitchen.
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Temperature like sun surface.
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and then eject through the nozzle to create a thrust.
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And basically, we re also selling the solar energy and collecting the solar energy to do this.
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And this is very important.
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Why?
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I mean, yes, we have a good prediction of weather, but it s still like this prediction is not very accurate after three, four days.
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Yes, I mean like we have all this like agri-technical models, but we cannot predict like a drought.
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We cannot predict actually the damage for agriculture.
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So we still in the very early days of creating this like a layer of like a digital reality of the physical world.
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almost a layer of another level of intelligence that we can use.
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But sure, and now, like I see with this autonomous cars, with like a lot of automation, like for in agriculture and forestry, it was all this like a problem, so it was changing of the climate.
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We need precisely to know what s where, like what piece of the road is covered with ice?
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Where is the fog?
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What is the moisture content in this piece?
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Like when the fire igniting this part of the forest, we need to make this.
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It s not so many ways how you can collect all this information because you cannot fly drones everywhere.
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There are some limitations.
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You cannot put sensors anywhere, but we can be in space and we can put the sensors in space.
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that basically collect this information and finally create the digital copy of the earth that can solve many problems and save a lot of lives of the people.
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And this is the way we are moving.
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Now, this is hundreds of the companies which are building different business models, different constellations to do different things, to collect different information.
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We, when you look on a space, you probably think that it s only like a SpaceX and Starlink and a good space actually show to everybody that it s possible to do, but
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Now, entrepreneurs is everywhere.
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I think unique thing about new space that you can find this company everywhere in the world.
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One of the largest producer of microsatellites, Lithuania.
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The company which building like an image and satellites high resolution, Poland.
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Another company doing like satellite service apartment Bulgaria.
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The largest in Northern and Southern America, the constellation of the satellites, it s actually in Argentina and they build satellites in Uruguay.
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And we basically help and enable, our goal is to make the deployment of the space assets cheaper and more efficient and deploy the satellites.
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Because finally it help us to understand what s happening on earth and improve life of everybody.
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So it s almost, you re seeing that we can increase the quality of life on earth by having this new layer of intelligence.
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There are people all over the earth and they ll see this as possible.
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So there s a new space race.
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It s not just to get places, it s to get these satellites out there so we can have these services that can change the quality of life from weather to
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business to anything out there.
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All these entrepreneurs are going there and the blockage has been cost.
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But now what was costing, you know, billions or hundreds of millions, you re now starting to get down to a cost level that people can do there because your cost is so low.
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So tell me just one more question.
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What is this water propulsion?
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Why is it so important?
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And, you know, for everything we re doing, not only for today for efficiency and cost and safety,
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but also for travel for humanity going forward, where are the sources of water that allow us to continue to go there, whereas we aren t able to put enough fuel in something right now, at least traditionally, to be able to go through the full solar system or beyond in an efficient financial way?
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Yeah, I mean, I think this is the beauty of this approach is that we have short-term and long-term advantages.
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The short-term
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Because we use the water as a propellant, it allows us to build the vehicles in a very low cost manner because we don t have this cryogenic, thank you fuel, or we don t use like this usual electrical propulsion, we use the xenon.
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Extremely expensive substance under high pressure and everything is very expensive.
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But on the longer term, again, the hydrogen is the most common mineral in the universe.
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And the most common oxide in the nature, it s the water, it s the oxide of hydrogen.
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And the water is everywhere.
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And several years ago, the water was discovered on the moon, because everybody was thinking moon, it s basically dying desert, like it s dry, nothing there.
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But now we know that in these craters, near the pole of the moon, it s actually billions and billions of tons of water.
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And the Moon is a pretty light celestial body.
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So, for example, to fly from Earth, in order to deliver one pound, you need to start with 100 pounds because it is gravity.
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We are on the very bottom of the gravity well.
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And when I was a child, I was thinking, what if our gravity would be 20% higher than on Earth?
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We wouldn t ever have a space age because the chemical rockets wouldn t be able to deliver anything in space.
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And we are lucky that we are on this very, very edge of the actually capabilities of the chemical rockets to deliver something to space.
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But from moon, it s much easier.
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To deliver one pound from moon, you need to start with two pounds, not with hundred.
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Wow.
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What a ratio difference.
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That s amazing.
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Because moon is small celestial body and you can do this.
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This is what we see the moon, moon is our future, like a oil well.
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It s our future, like the source of this propellant for the exploration of the solar system.
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And it s close, it s here.
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And yes, water is localized in several like craters, maybe dozens of craters.
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And this is actually the reason of the new space race, because people know that this place probably the most expensive real estate in solar system.
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now here in the moon.
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And this is the reason why now, instead of the race between Soviet Union and United States, now it s between United States and China.
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Who will get this water first?
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And it s also interesting because I invested years ago with one of those pioneer companies, Bill, that was going to mine asteroids and they were building their own spaceships.
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But the cost of them was so high that they lost that race.
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They finally had to sell their technology to other people.
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But these asteroids have materials that on Earth are extremely rare and therefore really expensive.
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And they re not rare on these asteroids.
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So there s a race for that as well.
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Just to finish up, tell me, with your first commercial launches just around the corner, how were you able to, as a business, secure customers like NASA and Lockheed Martin?
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Because I think that s instructive for anyone with large vision.
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Because you ve done it.
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Yeah, I mean, it s definitely great to have customers like Lockheed Martin and NASA.
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But I think we are lucky to have a lot of clients at the startups.
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Yes.
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these companies will be the next Googles, this company will be next Amazons in space, because everything great you can create only when you start from scratch.
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And NASA is a great organization, it s pushed humanity so much for doing excellent stuff.
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And Lockheed Martin, it s like the company was a deep culture and very important for national defense and for everything.
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But when you re talking like where the new things can be emergence from these new companies.
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And I think like our main treasure, actually this like a startups with whom we are working because these companies will become large.
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Maybe not of them, maybe like a nine for each 10 will fail and they will try next attempt.
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And we want to make them also the failure cheaper, faster, which is also important.
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Of course.
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basis of it all.
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Well, I wanted people to hear your story, not only because of the vision and size of it and scope and what you ve built and what you ve learned along the way, but also for investment purposes.
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You know, there are markets, you know, if you could have gone back and invested in Amazon in the 1990s, if you could have been in a position where you could anticipate the internet even before that,
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the opportunity and the growth is just insane.
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It could change an average person s life if they could understand that and have some bets in this area.
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And this is just a marketplace that s just beginning.
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It s a pioneering place, but you re incredibly well positioned because you have these really large players that want to play with you.
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But like you said, all these companies that are starting to grow, we re at the beginning of the beginning of the beginning of this process.
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And you really placed yourself in the lead by what the technology developed.
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I really acknowledge you and respect you, brother.
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Thank you for that.
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So to finish this all off, let s come back to you, Dakin.
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So many beautiful lessons here from people really living it, not people just talking about it.
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But tell me just to wrap up, part of why we re all here is because of our relationship and what the people you ve attracted in Prime Movers Lab, and I brought you a couple as well.
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Tell me what you really found this company for?
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What were you looking for?
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And maybe I touch a little bit about angel investor work.
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Not everybody s familiar with it.
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And what are the opportunities and what are the challenges with angel investment as a whole for people that have been hearing about these companies so they have an understanding of how you started out and what people can build with?
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I mean, our mission boils down to investing in breakthrough science that can transform billions of lives.
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And I think these are three of the 15 companies that we invested in in Fund One, and we ve got another 30 in Fund Two.
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So it s a good mix across many, many different areas.
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And really, the mission is, how do we make people s lives better?
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And it starts at a micro level.
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How do we make these entrepreneurs successful?
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How do we make them enjoy the process of building these companies, which translates to the kind of huge impacts we re hearing on a civilization-wide level?
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From an angel investing perspective, you teach people a business mastery that it s important to have investments in uncorrelated assets.
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Early stage private companies are extremely high risk, but also extremely high reward.
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It s an important part of a sophisticated investor s portfolio.
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This is not for somebody who s got a million dollars or something total of savings.
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This is many millions or even tens of millions of dollars of savings at the point which you can really afford to cut big enough investments into early stage startups that it makes sense to be investing in them and building a diversified basket because
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The mistake people make here is they ll just invest in one company because it s their friend s company.
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That s a good starting point, but you need to have a well-diversified portfolio, even within your startup investing.
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That s why using Ray Dalio s principle of 15 uncorrelated bets gives you an 80% reduction in risk with an increase in upside.
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We ve got a number of different companies, because at the end of the day, every single idea, I mean, we hear thousands of ideas a year.
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Every single one of them is actually a good idea and is going to happen at some point.
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The question is when, and we re not going to be right on every single bet that we make, but because we re making timing bets across a wide range of areas, energy, transportation, infrastructure, manufacturing, we ll be right on a couple, and those couple drive all of the returns for early stage investing.
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If you look at my personal angel portfolio,
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it s up 17x over the last seven years.
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And there s basically two companies out of a portfolio of more than a dozen that drive all of those returns.
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And that s how it always looks in venture capital.
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It is power law returns, where it doesn t matter what the
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14 other of the 15 companies do.
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It matters, is the top one a 50x?
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Is it 100x?
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Is it 250x?
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Is it 1000x?
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And we re really fortunate because of the great work that Bill, and Mikhail, and Jason, and you and Mamie at Kovacs are doing that we ve got a number of them that are well up there.
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Yeah, it s fantastic.
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What you just said, I shared that with you a while ago from listening to Ray Dalio.
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It was actually a conference.
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It was for you got to be a billionaire to be there.
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It s a pretty interesting conference by JP Morgan.
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When he said that, someone asked him a question because I ve been asking questions about non-correlated assets, meaning for those who are unfamiliar.
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everything ties to what the stock market does.
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And the stock market goes down, everything goes down.
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So you want things that are not correlated.
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And when he came up with that statistic, there was a murmur in the room.
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It was such an interesting piece that you can increase your return while reducing your risk by having those uncorrelated assets at that ratio.
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It s pretty invaluable.
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So to finish this off, what do you want people to know about what it means to be an entrepreneur?
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What do you want people to know about what it means to work on things that can change the world?
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I want to finish the last word for you, Dick.
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I think we re heading towards a world in which many people are going to be entrepreneurs.
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Most people are going to be entrepreneurs.
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Really, we re going to be playing the game of work for the fun of it and the joy of it and what we can create for other people, not because we need to.
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And that s a beautiful and exciting thing.
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And that s where worlds both externally and internally open up when we have that kind of freedom to work on the things that are most meaningful to us.
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So I m glad that I get to work with entrepreneurs who are so inspiring and exciting.
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And I hope that everyone takes a step on that journey in whatever form it takes for them.
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for all those that are still with us, I hope that what you got from this, my goal in doing this was to maybe create a moment of excitement in you, where you think about the future in a different way, where you don t just listen to the news, which every day is droning on and on.
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And it has an agenda.
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Its agenda is not a harsh one.
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It s just an agenda that there s an economics to that news, unfortunately.
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And so good ideas rarely interrupt you.
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They have to be pursued.
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You have to look for them.
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So
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Our goal here is to put you in front of those tools that can give you a greater sense of what s happening in the world, both so you can be a first mover yourself and perhaps make use of those things that are valuable for you.
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Secondly, we all need to become investors.
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You can use an Apple phone or you can own part of Apple.
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And the reason so many people suffer financially is not because the opportunity isn t there and it s not because they don t have enough money.
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it s because they re consumers, they re not owners.
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And if there s anything I hope this will get you to do is to think about the future in a new way to excite you, to get you through the temporary ups and downs of issues like COVID or racism.
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They re all real issues, but there s nothing humanity has created that humanity can t solve, as we ve already said.
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But also, if you want to participate in
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helping those people that are working on the cutting edge of increasing the quality of life for all people, you can be an owner with them and you can prosper as they prosper in helping millions, tens of millions, hundreds of millions, or perhaps billions of people.
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So, hope this has been inspiring for you and if you re an entrepreneur, I hope you ve listened to some of the great lessons that these entrepreneurs have given us by taking a couple hours of their time to just share from the heart
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what they ve learned.
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So I want to thank you, Bill Gross, the most successful entrepreneur in growing companies from nothing to over a billion.
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He s already got seven.
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No one s done that.
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If you re listening, it looks like he s got his eighth and ninth and maybe 10th one on the way.
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Mikhail, for what you re doing to open up space
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Jason, for what you re doing to help us and make Brooklyn a farming environment, but any place be a farming environment with both, as you said, not only cheaper costs and better nutrients, but delicious.
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And Dakin for your incredible pioneering efforts to pull together such great entrepreneurs.
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It s been a pleasure to spend time with all of you again.
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I love you.
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I respect you.
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And for all of you at home, thank you for joining us again for the Tony Robbins podcast.
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Till we see you soon.
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Live strong, live with passion and God bless.
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The Tony Robbins Podcast is directed by Tony Robbins and produced by the Tony Robbins team.
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Copyright Robbins Research International.