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I'm really excited to share with you
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some findings that really surprise me
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about what makes companies
succeed the most,
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what makes factors
actually matter the most
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for startup success.
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I believe that the startup organization
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is one of the greatest forms
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to make the world a better place.
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If you take a group of people
with the right equity incentives,
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organize them in a startup,
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you can unlock human potential
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in a way never before possible.
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you get them to achieve
unbelievable things.
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But if the startup organization is so great,
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why do so many fail?
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That's what I wanted to find out.
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I wanted to find out what
actually matters most
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for startup success.
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I wanted to try to be systematic about it,
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avoid some of my instincts
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and maybe some of
my misperceptions I have
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from some of the companies
I've seen over the years.
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I wanted to know this because
I've been starting businesses
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since I was 12-years-old
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when I sold candy at the bus stop
in junior high school,
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to high school, when I sold
solar energy devices,
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to college, when I made loudspeakers.
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And when I graduated from college,
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started software companies.
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And 20 years ago,
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I started Idealab,
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and in the last 20 years,
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we started more than 100 companies.
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Many successes, and many big failures.
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We learned a lot from those failures.
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So I tried to look across what factors
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accounted the most for company
success and failure.
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So I looked at these five.
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First, the Idea.
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I used to think that
the idea was everything.
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I named my company Idealab
and how much I worship
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the "aha!" moment when you first
come up with the idea.
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But then over time,
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I came to think that maybe the team,
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the execution, adaptability,
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that mattered even more than the idea.
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I never thought I'd be quoting
boxer Mike Tyson on the TED stage,
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but he once said,
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"Everybody has a plan, until they get
punched in the face",
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and that's so true about business as well.
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So much about a team's execution
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is its ability to adapt to getting punched
in the face by the customer.
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The customer is the true reality.
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And that's why I came to think
that the team
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maybe was the most important thing.
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Then I started looking
at the business model.
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Does the company have a very clear path
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generating customer revenues?
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That started rising to the top
in my thinking
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about maybe what mattered
for success.
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Then I looked at the funding.
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Sometimes companies received
intense amounts of funding.
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Maybe that' the most important thing?
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And then of course,
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the timing.
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Is the idea way too early,
and the world's not ready for it?
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Is it early,
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as in, you're in advance
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and you have to educate the world?
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Is it just right?
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Or is it too late, and there are
too many competitors?
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So I tried to look very carefully
at these five factors
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across many companies.
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And I looked across all 100
Idealab companies,
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and 100 non-Idealab companies
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to try and come up with something
scientific about it.
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So first, on these Idealab companies,
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the top five companies--
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citysearch, CarsDirect, overture,
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NetZero and tickets.com--
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those all became billion dollar successes.
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And the give companies on the bottom --
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Z.com, insider pages,
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myLife, Desktop Factory, People Link--
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we all had high hopes for,
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but didn't succeed.
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So I tried to rank across all
of those attributes
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how I felt those companies scored
on each of those dimensions.
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And then for non-Idealab companies,
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I looked at wild successes,
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like airbnb and Instagram and Uber
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and Youtube and Linkedin.
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And some failures:
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webvan, kozmo, pets.com
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flooz, friendster.
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The bottom companies had intense funding,
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they even had business models,
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in some cases,
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but they didn't succeed.
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I tried to look at what factors
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actually accounted the most
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in success and failure across
all of these companies,
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and the results really surprised me.
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The number one thing was timing.
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Timing accounted for 42 percent
of the difference
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between success and failure.
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Team/ execution came in second,
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and the idea, the differentiability
of the idea,
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the uniqueness of the idea,
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that actually came in third.
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Now, this isn't absolutely definitive,
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it's not to say that
the idea isn't important,
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but it very much surprised me
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that the idea wasn't t
he most important thing.
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Sometimes it mattered more when
it was actually timed.
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The last two,
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business model and funding,
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made sense to me, actually.
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I think business model made sense
to me that low
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because you could start out
without a business model
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and then add one later
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if your customers are demanding
what you're creating.
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And funding, I think as well,
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if you're underfunded at first
but you're gaining traction,
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especially in today's age,
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it's very, very easy to get
intense funding.
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So now let me give you
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some specific examples
about each of these.
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So take a wild success like airbnb,
everybody knows about.
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Well, that company was famously
passed on
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by many smart investors
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because people thought,
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"No one's going to rent out
a space in their home
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to a stranger."
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Of course, people proved that wrong.
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But one of the reasons it succeeded,
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aside from a good business model,
a good idea,
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great execution,
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is the timing.
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That company came out
right at the height
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of the recession.
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People really needed extra money,
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and that maybe helped
people overcome
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their objection to renting out
their own home
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to a stranger.
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Same thing with Uber.
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Uber came out,
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incredible company,
incredible business model,
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great execution, too.
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But the timing was so perfect
for their need
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to get drivers into the system.
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Drivers were looking for extra money,
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it was very, very important.
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Some of our early successes, city search,
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came out when people needed web pages.
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goto.com,
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which we announced at TED in 1998,
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when companies were looking for
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cost effective ways to get traffic.
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We thought the idea was so great,
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but actually, the timing was probably
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even more important.
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And then some of our failures.
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We started a company called Z.com,
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it was an online entertainment company.
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We were so excited about it --
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we raised enough money,
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we had a great business model,
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we even signed incredibly great
Hollywood talent
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to join the company.
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But broadband penetration
was too low in 1999-2000.
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It was too hard to watch
video content online,
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you had to put codex in your browser
and do all this stuff.
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We actually went out of business in 2003.
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Just two years later,
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when the codex problem
was solved by Adobe Flash
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and when broadband penetration
crossed 50 percent in America,
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Youtube was perfectly timed.
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Great idea, but unbelievable timing.
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Youtube didn't even have
a business model
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when it started.
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It wasn't even certain that
that would work out.
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But that was beautifully,
beautifully timed.
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So what I would say, in summary,
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is execution definitely matters a lot.
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The idea matters a lot.
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But timing might matter even more.
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And the best way to really assess timing
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is to really look at whether consumers
are really ready
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for what you have to offer them.
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And to be really, really honest about it,
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not being in denial about
any results that you see,
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because if you have something you love,
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you want to push it forward,
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be very, very honest about
that factor on timing.
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As I said earlier,
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I think startups can change the world
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and make the world a better place.
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I hope some of these insights can
maybe help you
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have a slightly higher success ratio,
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and thus make something great
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come to the world
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that wouldn't have happened otherwise.
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Thank you very much,
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you've been a great audience.
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(Applause)