Kimbal Musk
speaker
257 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2024
last heard Mar 2024
Kimbal Musk’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
And now I'd created this macro that you could not just do it, you could tweak it and say, oh, I want this area of the world or this area of, or this month or that month compared to that month, all the normal things you could do with a spreadsheet. And the software was on a floppy disk. And I was like, here's the software and just put it into your computer. All right, now open one, two, three.
And it just pops up with a little box that type in your dates and the whole little thing like that. And what I was astounded by was Not so much that it was a magic trick. It was the lack of appreciation for innovation. They just looked at it. They were like, oh, that's nice.
And I was like, we're going to have someone spend hundreds of hours doing something, and now it's something you can do in a minute.
Yeah, if that doesn't move your needle, what the heck? And so I was really disappointed with the banking world. But anyway, that was also fun. Such a good example, though.
But then I got back to business school, and I – I canceled all of my business classes I possibly could. I was actually in business school, so I couldn't cancel them all. All finance courses, I'm done with that industry. I'm not going back. So the vulnerable part for me was my whole family is full of entrepreneurs. And there was this franchise to do house painting.
And I genuinely was afraid that I wouldn't be good at it. And I was like, wow, I really am afraid of failure. It's very easy to avoid entrepreneurship. But if your whole family is entrepreneurs and you go in and you aren't good, I was really afraid.
Yes. And it's – our family are wonderful and everything, but they – But pretty much everyone's an entrepreneur. And, and of course not everyone is perfect and everyone's doing it successfully all the time. But when you're, when you're young and you want to prove yourself, it really was putting my heart on my sleeve. I started the, the, the business in this part of Toronto and,
For the first, you paint the houses in the summer, but you do all your sales before the summer. And all the way until April, I was just not succeeding. And I was like, oh, my God, I'm just going to fail. And I remember that. My whole nervous system was like, I'm a failure. I'm a failure.
and I remember I had this general manager who, who, you know, he was like, you seem like you'd know what you're doing. Why are you not making any sales? And so, so he actually went with me on a few sales calls and I was like, and he's like, Oh, you're, he was great. You're doing this wrong. You're doing that wrong. You're doing this wrong and change those three things. And it was like a, uh,
like a watershed moment. All of a sudden, and I just followed the instructions of what this guy had told me. All of a sudden, every single sale I would make, I was like, I can't believe that I... It was really my lack of humility to learn from someone else. I was like, no, I'm going to prove that I can do this without your teachings. And I... I was going to fail.
I would say if we have an openness to learning, which does require humility, you course correct, you help get other people to help you course correct. But it does start with humility because if you try and pretend you have all the answers, you don't.
Yeah, so mapping had been on the internet, but vector-based mapping had not. So that's the ability to zoom in or zoom out, and it's really data versus an image that comes across. And we went to this company called Navtech, my brother and I, and we just asked for the data. And this is Silicon Valley. They wrote us a one-page letter that we had to sign and said, here's all of our data. We own it.
You don't own it. But you can use it on the internet, and if you ever make any money on it, you have to call us. That was it? Yeah. All right, okay. That sounds great. So we put it up on the internet and back in those days it might take 60 to 120 seconds to actually give you an answer back. But... It was amazing. The door-to-door directions, the ability to take a map and zoom in and zoom out.
We use these things 10 times a day now. It was amazing. We were the first two humans to see it on the internet. This stuff didn't even exist to the world. The Navtech was building it for Hertz Neverloss, which would come out a few years later. This was not something that people knew existed. This was something we discovered that it existed.
And we're like, well, let's put it on the internet and share it with the world.
It was amazing. It was like, what?
I don't think people understand that. Before this moment, you could not be told your directions. You just could not. Like today, we live in this world where we're told our directions all the time. Before this moment, you could not be told your directions. And all of a sudden, you could. It wasn't like a little thing.
Holy shit, this is going to be used by everyone all the time forever.
I would say it was a success, but it was also a very hard company to build. And I mean it because the internet in those days was a boom time. We were being funded, but you couldn't make any money. And so it was actually really hard. The constant outside criticism that we aren't for real, this is not going to survive, this is not going to, and it started to feel that way.
We're like, wow, man, this is, we are doing something that is great that people are using, and we were top 100 website users. Most of our work was through folks like the New York Times, so we were even much busier than that. But there was just no money in it. Even today, go to Google Maps, there's no money in it.
Showing 201–220 of 257 · page 11 of 13
← Previous
Next →