Adeo Ressi, Founder Institute: „Replace Facebook with something good for humanity”

We talked during a podcast recorder in Bucharest about the endemic problems of the startups world, about investments and hyperinvestments and finding new business models for companies of the future. Also, we talked about Founder Institute future and what are the things that are important for the incubator right now. 

Read the Romanian article here if you want. 

Listen to the podcast below. Also, the transcript of the recording is available.

• „We need good business models run by good people, we need good investors, good founders, good incentives in the public markets, good regulation and create a new class of billion and trillion dollar companies to replace the Google, to replace the Facebook, to replace the Amazon, to replace the Apple that are not having positive effects on humanity.”
• „If you’re growing really, really fast, there are things that are broken. If you’re growing really fast you glaze over the problems for growth and growth alone. When you have investors that encourage hypergrowth, you have founders that encourage the model, you have markets that demand hypergrowth the companies are glazing over problems. And the examples are multiple, like Apple or Amazon. I bought a cable for an Apple Watch for 50 dollars. I don’t think it’s worth more than one dollar. Meanwhile Apple is sitting on tons of cash and that’s not being used to help humanity at all. Something is got to change where people and companies can start fo focus on fixing the problems. Apple has issues with slave labour and real problems.”
• „It’s nobody fault. If things grew fast, but not hyperfast, some of these problems would be fixed. Let’s think of a more sustainable model to grow where our drivers, customers and the company can all win”
• „If you want to look for an idea that automatically has mass market and mass industry and mass Government support, go for an UN sustainable development business”
• „If I want go save the world, shouldn’t I get a lot of money first and then use that money to save the world? The answer is no. Bill Gates, for an example, has arguably all the money in the world. He spent hundreds of millions of dollars to build a toilet. And it failed. It turns out that it’s not really money.”
• „I want to help people in Eastern Europe, Middle East, Africa, to create entities and the purpose is not only empowering the individual, but really to make the world more beautiful. Historically, if you look at businesses that were created, that was a lot of centralization. You had centralized media, Government controls, banking. As a societal engineer, when I look at the future, I see a movement towards descentralization”
• „If you look at what I am and what my calling is as a human being, you can say I am a societal engineer. I see the big picture of the world to make that society more beautiful. The mechanism is the field of entrepreneurship. I started in this field as an entrepreneur and I created two separate billion dollars companies before I was 30 years old. And then went on to work on different organisations, like the X Prize and eventually I started helping other entrepreneurs”
• „My vocation is as a societal engineer and I’be been pursuing that in the field of entrepreneurship. The first thing I did was to create a company that really started the Internet boom and then I created a company that helped the Internet reach the masses and then after that I started working at other societal impact, like creating an entrepreneurial boom world wide”
• „Money is a means to an end. However in a lot of the world today, money has become the end. Your job is the means to the money which is the end. In fact, money originated as a means to an end. Because of the prosperity of the world, money has become the end to itself because it’s relatively easy to live.”
• „We have entered the decade of change when we will hit the UN sustainable development goals by 2030. We have a decade to hit them. It is my belief that no great business of this decade will be started unless is changing the world and hitting those goals from the UN.”
• ”There are two endemic foolish things that has happened in the world of startups and a correction is underway. The first endemic foolish things is hyperfunding to pursue and achieve hypergrowth. This has massive unintended consequences that have really damaged society.  Examples are Uber, Lyft and others. The hyperfunding of them for hypergrowth has really created an untanable labour market, where you’ve got drivers that buy expensive cars, start making money, meanwhile Uber and Lyft are reducing rates, so now you’re creating this situation of servitude where drivers who buy an expensive cars have to maintain them with decreasing living wages. Now they are working just to keep the car, not making a lot of money besides that, having 3-4 jobs to get at the end of the day.”
• „You know have massive unprofitable behemoths like Uber and WeWork that are actually doing societal harm. They changed society in good ways, but they are net negative. They are unprofitable and they created a problems with their clients and partners.”
• ”To some extent, you’re not gonna fix Apple. That company is broken at the core. You’re not gonna fix Amazon, Facebook. What we need to do now is to build better models. The Softbank fund of hyperfunding companies to get the hypergrowth thank God it broke. It shouldn’t work. It’s bad. It’s proven to have unintended negative consequences that outweigh the positive consequences.”