Entrepreneurs

"There are always critics. It’s really easy to say, “You can’t do something,” when you’re the one that’s not doing it! Don’t give in to that way of thinking. My experience on this journey proves that seemingly “impossible” things can be done."

"That would be Hurricane Harvey in 2017. Where my family lives in Houston, we were relatively safe — until the Army Corps of Engineers released the west side dams in hopes of preventing even worse flooding in other parts of the city. We had no warning, no time to escape. Suddenly, we were flooded. My daughter and I were rescued by strangers in a boat at our front door."

"“E-books now have all the potential to grow Human beings have always loved being told beautiful stories, more entertaining than their daily lives.”"

"Be vulnerable. It may sound counterintuitive, but in order to build resilience, you first have to let yourself experience emotions. When you try to bury them, they just build up — and, one day, coming pouring out when you least expect it. You have to experience the lows to get to the highs. From cancer to Harvey, I’ve had to let myself feel down and accept support from loved ones during those times."

"Life is about connecting with people and how can we do that? These 3 abstractions connect every human being on earth love, time, and death. We long for love, we wish we had more time, and we fear death.” I think if we all lived our lives with this in mind, we would move forward in so many ways."

"started really thinking about what I wanted to do and how I could best impact other people’s lives. I concluded that telling my story about racism issues I have dealt with as well as providing support to other people experiencing MS challenges would be a great start."

"Then I got to talk to most of the people there. That was very important to me. I don't miss the all-consuming job, but I miss the people. I get quickly attached to people around me. I am still in touch with many of my former colleagues and employees,”"

"I was the only female in most of what I did at the time. I've never been afraid of it, but it's apparent that it wasn't good with so little awareness around gender balance and diversity,”"

""It won't evolve as the industry wants, but as the user chooses."

"Celebrate your successes. I’m the last one to give great advice on how to do this, because I’m often wary of doing this myself! My team members frequently have to point these out to me — holding global events, testifying in Congress, giving a speech about gender equality in Saudi Arabia, being selected for two positions with the federal government (ambassador to the Equity in Energy initiative and member of the National Petroleum Council). I’m usually focused on what I still want to achieve for the company, and don’t stop often to look at what’s already happened. But my team helps me do so, and that’s important."

"I believe I was quite brave and dared to do new things. I wanted us to be the best at developing and, not least, adopting new technology. I have contributed to get us to where we are on the subsea realm – including developing a complete subsea factory [at Åsgard] many years before anyone else. When you ask me to look back at my time in Equinor, that’s something I am proud of,""

"When I started the business, most people said it would never succeed! They wrote off the whole idea that diversifying the energy workforce would be seen as a priority. They told me it would be a waste of time and money, that I was giving up my career for nothing."

""Most people read on their phones or tablets, not on an e-reader."

"Build self-awareness. Figure out what’s behind those emotions. What fears and insecurities are at work in your psyche? When I faced cancer the second time, I had to accept that I had spent too much of my life worrying about what other people think. That perspective was drilled into me. I realized that those fears were largely responsible for how I was handling tough situations. Therapy can be helpful in his process, guiding people to understand their own mindsets. The true path to any kind of self-actualization is through being conscious about who you are. A lot happens in the mind, including unconsciously."

"Coming out of the storm, I not only worked to rebuild, but also became more committed than ever to the mission. To tackle climate change, we need to usher in the most diverse, inclusive workforce to the field of energy. We need all ideas and perspectives. We need to act as one, and stop the bickering."

"When I was 12, I faced down a bully at school. She was always putting kids into the garbage. She got me a bunch of times. I kept trying to avoid her. Then, my dad told me to fight back. So one day when she came for me, I swung at her. She was shocked. It was all that much worse because I did so in front of the boys. It made a difference. She left me alone after that."

"It was shocking at first, we also had a huge drop in our revenues at the beginning which has since picked up very nicely. It’s hard to remember now, but there were a lot of uncertainties back in the spring of last year. We didn’t know how long it would last, how deep we would fall.”."

"It’s easier to inspire once you have a track record because people can just look at your CV and understand the experience and credibility you are bringing to the role. It is much harder for people coming in to a large leadership role for the first time."

"leadership is a team play”, and it is crucial to build trust, focus on how people perform together, and empower them with confidence and autonomy."

"When you see great leadership in action, then it’s apparent. And it’s similarly self-evident when leadership is lacking, or worse, missing in action."

"There’s no shortcut or silver bullet to being an inspirational leader. The only way to do it is to lead by example and in accordance with your values — ultimately you must walk the talk."

"we decided and declared that we would not put anybody on temporary or permanent leave despite the fact that we lost revenue in the beginning. This made employees realize that we really wanted to be in this together.”"

"Startups often have a black box mentality when it comes to socialising with competition."

"The startup spirit has always sought to free itself of corporate-isms. When it came to setting the tone of their founding team,"

"For mission-driven startups, entering territories with greater risk from a business perspective could raise flags but when viewed from a mission perspective, not tackling them could be worse."

"Bold Leadership is having the confidence and the capability to attract others and to inspire, motivate and support them in achieving predefined goals and objectives."

"Sometimes it’s unconventional! Some of those conversations are what led to my podcast episode on founder wellbeing and mental health. So, I would be remiss in not pointing you towards my podcast, Now, That’s What I Call Business!"

"In a complex world with a lot of uncertainty, leaders have to embrace what seems to be opposing traits to succeed. On one hand, they have to act like heroes, exuding confidence, while on the other hand, they have to be humble, be able to take advice, and change course. In sum, they have to be humble heroes"

"Being a good listener is about creating a situation where people feel comfortable telling you things. A lot of that has to do with demeanor. The best listeners project openness, patience, and a sincere curiosity to hear the other person’s story. You need to ask the right questions, pick up on little Easter eggs hidden in the conversation, and also detect subtle, nonverbal cues about how the person is feeling or what they may be holding back. I go into detail about how to accomplish this in my book"

"It’s all about building a community around energy. I’m over the political squabbles and other divides that prevent us all from working as one team. I even argued in a Newsweek column that “big oil” companies should hire environmental activists like Greta Thunberg! Take all that energy and passion that people have to bring solutions, and have them contribute. Everyone stands to gain from what I call Energy 2.0 — the energy of the future, filled with renewable and other greener sources, as well as carbon reduction and carbon capture systems. This is what we’re building at ALLY Energy: one community around energy. And I’m determined to never give up."

"But listening is a skill, and like any skill, it takes practice. Some may have more natural talent for it, like playing a sport or musical instrument, but we all can, and should, put serious effort into getting better at it. Your effectiveness and happiness depend on it. Good listeners are not only good doctors, they are good human beings."

". “I had to be an entrepreneur because I want to solve problems and have practical applications,"

"That’s the whole story of my career, That's my passion, finding science-based products that work and that offer farmers and other customers a value proposition compared to chemical pesticides."

"I wanted to be an entomologist since I was about 8 years old “I saw all the trees getting ruined by these caterpillars. My father used a chemical to kill them on a prized dogwood outside the kitchen window [but] it killed all the good bugs – lady beetles, lacewings, honeybees and so forth."

"A lot of professors from different schools said they didn't want to take women because women would just have children, and that would disrupt the Ph.D. Both at Cornell and at NC State, I had really good professors,“They were very supportive of me."

"I've always been driven toward the mission and vision of helping find effective, environmentally friendly pest management products and saving the planet at the same time."

"Medicine is definitely a huge one. It’s important to remember that there is a global shortage of doctors that is quite large in some countries."

"For instance, in Nigeria, it would take 300 years to train enough doctors to fill the shortage with their existing pipeline. I know a pediatric radiologist from South Africa who said there are only 14 pediatric radiologists for the entire African continent. My hope is that deep learning will help doctors and community health workers be more effective."

"I thought that was such an awesome application and something I never would have thought of! I want every dairy farmer and people no matter their profession or where they are in the world to be able to use this technology on the problems that they care about."

"I don’t think of these people as traditional mentors, but I’ve learned a lot from them and have been encouraged by them. One is my co-founder Jeremy Howard. I’ve learned a ton working with him in how he solves problems both technically in coding and in business."

"Deep learning refers to a specific class of algorithm that are also known as “multi-layered neural networks.” These algorithms are getting amazing, world-class results on a variety of problems. For example, identifying what object is in a picture, translating text, or understanding speech. It’s used in voice recognition as well."

"It’s the problem I’m working on with fast.ai: making deep learning easier to use and getting it into the hands of people that wouldn’t normally have access. One of our students that just finished our course is a Canadian dairy farmer. He said he needed to learn how to use AI to improve the health of his goats’ udders."

"Training robots in the real-world is difficult and time consuming. An emerging alternative is to train robots in photorealistic video-game simulators to make training much faster."

"Training on the generated houses led to remarkably robust agents across several distributional shifts. We’ve still yet to hit a ceiling on how much further such a simple recipe can go."

"UW is an exceptional place to do AI research. Particularly now that AI progress requires a lot of engineering and computational power."

"I was completely amazed. Witnessing the impressive results, it felt like I was experiencing pure magic."

"This eye-opening experience led me to realize the impact computer vision would have on the field of computer graphics. It soon became clear that these AI techniques would transform industries far beyond design."

"Tokens are a very powerful way of distributing control. How many companies will make the shift to a token-based economy? Big companies coming from China like Tencent and Alibaba understand it. The old industrial companies will fight it. They may win some battles but they won’t be able to compete because of the way they are organized. The net of this is not an easy message. Corporations like to think about change being incremental and they don’t like it when I tell them that in this case it won’t be."

"The field of AI is beginning to change the world. It is incredibly rewarding being able to work on the cutting-edge of research and pushing the frontier of what’s possible in science and technology."

"ICOs are token generation events. There is sloppiness in how people talk about utilization tokens versus speculation tokens. An example of a utilization token is when you join a community and create a kilowatt of sustainable energy and it generates a token."