Bill Gross (Idealab & eSolar) - A Devotion to New Ideas

Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders (ETL)

Stanford eCorner

Journey, Startups, Education, Stanford, Culture, Strategy, Stanford University, Entrepreneurship, Business, Life Lessons, Thought Leadership, Creativity, Etl, Challenges, Leadership, Innovation, Founders

4.4 • 739 Ratings

🗓️ 23 February 2011

⏱️ 57 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Bill Gross thrives on turning innovative ideas into pioneering companies. He serves as founder and CEO of Idealab, which started over 75 companies since 1996. In this stimulating lecture, he shares how Idealab continues to bring incredible ideas to market, and his personal insights on starting and running successful organizations. Gross also describes the work of eSolar, a spin-off company of Idealab that works to make solar energy cost-competitive in the global marketplace.

Transcript

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0:00.0	You are listening to the DFJ Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders series, brought you weekly by the Stanford Technology Ventures Program.
0:10.3	You can find podcasts and videos of these lectures online at eChorner.standford.edu.
0:18.6	So it's my pleasure today to welcome Bill Gross, the CEO of a number of things, including
0:24.7	e-solar and some other properties. As you can see on the screen over here, here's a few of them
0:31.1	over the last 15 years. But I've had the pleasure of knowing Bill, I want to just keep counting,
0:37.2	past 15.
0:39.0	When I was lucky to be in the software industry early on in the 80s, and Bill was making
0:46.1	a mark for himself in Los Angeles.
0:47.9	So we are really, really happy to have a Cal Tech grad and have a Los Angeles resident
0:53.7	come all the way up here to Northern California
0:55.8	to share his wisdom. So give a big welcome to Bill Gross.
1:01.8	Well, thank you very much for inviting me here. It's an honor to be here. I'd like to talk to you both about entrepreneurship and about my dreams for powering the planet sustainably. I've been starting businesses all my life ever since I was 12 years old. I'd like to share some of the painful lessons I've learned over those years with you. At the same time, hopefully inspire more of you to take an entrepreneurial path because of how ridiculously
1:28.7	rewarding that can be. Well, first let me go back to 1973. It was the energy crisis. I was 15 years
1:35.8	old. I grew up in San Fernando Valley. And while this energy crisis was going on, I was taking
1:40.0	physics and trigonometry in high school. So I was learning about heat engines and parabolas.
1:45.0	And I got very excited about conic sections. And fortunately, my high school had a metal shop.
1:50.0	And I took metal shop and was trying to figure out how can we make devices that could possibly help the planet in this energy crisis at that time.
1:57.0	So I started making little engines and parabolic concentrators. And my very first sketch, this was
2:02.2	the very first sketch I found, of a compact sterling engine that I wanted to make. And this was the
2:06.3	actual engine running after I took a whole term of that metal shop class. And I took that engine,
2:10.8	and I took a little parabolic concentrator that I made to be able to make it run off the sun. And I
2:15.3	started making plans and kits for them. And I actually started my first business then. A little company called Solar Devices, and I took out ads in the
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