3 Takeaways
Loonshots: How Lunatic, Moonshot Ideas Become Real and Change the World (#222)
Tue, 05 Nov 2024
It’s not easy for huge, breakthrough ideas — the kind that truly change the world — to see the light of day. Here, physicist, entrepreneur and author Safi Bahcall talks in detail about the creativity and determination required, plus the obstacles to overcome, and cites fascinating examples including James Bond, Lipitor, Apple, Airbnb and others.
Chapter 1: What are loonshots and why are they important?
You would think that the first time someone had the idea of using an invisible sound signal to detect ships and planes, or a drug to kill tumors by choking their drug supply, or a drug to reduce cholesterol, that these ideas would be immediately recognized as brilliant and adopted. but are the most important breakthroughs immediately recognized as brilliant or are they written off as crazy?
Chapter 2: How do we nurture breakthrough ideas?
And how do we nurture more of the breakthrough ideas that win wars and cure diseases? Hi, everyone. I'm Lynn Thoman, and this is Three Takeaways. On Three Takeaways, I talk with some of the world's best thinkers, business leaders, writers, politicians, newsmakers, and scientists. Each episode ends with three key takeaways to help us understand the world and maybe even ourselves a little better.
Today, I'm excited to be with Safi Bakal. Safi is a former public company CEO, physicist, award-winning entrepreneur, and author of the wonderful international bestseller, Loon Shots. Safi co-founded a biotechnology company which developed new drugs for cancer. He led its IPO and served as the CEO for 13 years. He worked with President Obama's Council of Science Advisors.
Safi's book, Loonshots, was selected as the best book of the year by Amazon, Bloomberg, The Financial Times, and The Washington Post. His book was also recommended by Bill Gates, Danny Kahneman, and Malcolm Gladwell.
As a biotech founder and entrepreneur, as well as the author of Loonshots, Safi is just the person to ask about, as he says in his book, how to nurture the crazy ideas that win wars, cure diseases, and transform industries. Welcome, Safi, and thanks so much for joining Three Takeaways today.
Thanks for having me, Lynn. Happy to be here.
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Chapter 3: What are some examples of successful loonshots?
It is my pleasure. I really enjoyed your book.
Thanks for saying so.
Can you talk about some examples of the greatest loon shots and how they actually happened?
When you look at some of the biggest ideas that have created some of the biggest businesses and industry in the last two decades, it's cloud services. The idea that you can take every company's IT budget, every company in the world, the tens of millions or hundreds of millions or billions that they spend on computers and technology and give it to one of two companies on the planet.
That's a lot of money. That's roughly a trillion dollars in revenue. And 15 years ago, 20 years ago, if you would have said, here's my idea, I'm going to go to every company in the world. And you know, your IT budget that you're buying these metal boxes and these software things that you buy, forget it.
Just give it to one company or maybe two companies, throw away all your computers and they'll do everything in the cloud for you. People would have said, you're nuts. That's a crazy idea. And not just old established companies, but really good companies like Microsoft and Google, who were dominating cloud IT at the time, 15 or 20 years ago, or a dominating business to business.
Those companies said, yeah, nobody's going to do that. It took a tiny little player, someone that was nothing in the business to business world, a company that was known for selling diapers online, which was called Amazon at the time. It was basically a mail order catalog that was splashed onto the internet. And they said, what if we try this crazy thing?
And they came from nowhere in this space versus much, much bigger business to business competitors. And clobbered them. So that's an example of a recent business where everybody wrote the idea off as crazy. And if you go back in time, so many of these ideas were written off as crazy from funny examples of Airbnb.
Who's going to rent out their room to have people sleep in their bedrooms or whatever? Yeah. All the way back to the transistor, nobody's going to believe that you can make a switch out of a tiny little metal sandwich, which of course transformed the last century with all the rise of electronics.
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Chapter 4: Why do large organizations struggle to innovate?
And they finally found some guy who had been a milk truck driver and had been in two movies. And nobody had heard of him. His name was Sean Connery. The movie was called Dr. No. And the studio said, good God, this is a disaster. We're not going to open it on many screens. We're just going to find two movie screens in the United States. I think it was in some random places and not even big markets.
An opening weekend. And who knew? People loved it. And it grew into the longest running film franchise of all time. So that was an example of a loon shot. And one of the lessons there is all these ideas look really crazy in the beginning, but that's the reason they're such big ideas because everybody else writes them off.
and the first person that breaks through is going to do very well so what does the statin drugs have to do with that that was the same idea the statin drugs are the drugs that as you probably know lower cholesterol they're responsible for preventing tens of millions of heart attacks maybe other than antibacterials or vaccines, responsible for the most lives saved over the last 30, 40 years.
And when it was first suggested by a Japanese guy named Akira Endo, who just passed away actually this year, people said, no, that's a dumb idea. There's no way you can take a pill to lower cholesterol. That's the stupidest idea we've ever heard.
Chapter 5: What is the significance of failing fast?
And so what James Bond and the statin drugs have in common is that they were all loon shots, they all had multiple deaths, and they all became the most successful franchise of their field.
Large organizations have the people and the money to back big ideas. Why don't large organizations innovate more?
I'll give you three of the Fs. Fear, focus, and framework. Fear we just talked about, but it becomes directly related to your ability to run experiments where if you punish people for failing. I ran an experiment and it didn't work. Oh, you demote it or you don't get a bonus. What are they going to do? They're only going to run experiments that work.
What's an experiment that you know in advance is going to work? Nothing. It's not a real experiment. It's playing it safe. You're not innovating. The second F is focus. Very often, leaders will say, I want everybody to innovate. Innovation is good. Come back to me with your ideas. And then people come back with, well, I'd like us to build a train set. I'd like a credit card.
I'd like to do a t-shirt. I'd like to open a theme park. And it's like, what are you talking about? You know, we run a tractor company. What are you talking about credit cards and t-shirts and theme parks? So then says no to all these ideas. And what happened? People become demotivated. Like, oh, I'm not taking my ideas here anymore. So the lack of focus is a big problem.
And a third one is framework. If you don't have a framework, eventually you're just throwing, again, just throwing spaghetti on the wall, people doing a bunch of ideas. And then now what? All right, I did an idea. I got that you want to experiment. It worked. And now what? I don't know. So if you don't have a framework for advancing projects and ideas along a pipeline,
with a system of here's where it goes from a one-day $100 experiment to a five-week $5,000 experiment to a 50,000 five-month experiment. And here's a little group that's gonna be making the decisions. Unless you create that system, it's just gonna be gunk. So once you can work on these three things, that ends up making a big difference.
Can you talk about the barbell structure, what you call the soldiers and creatives?
In every group that I've spent time with, you see what I like to think of as the beautiful baby problem. So you have inside the organization what you can think of as the artists or the creatives who are coming up with their new idea.
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Chapter 6: How do James Bond and Lipitor represent loonshots?
Steve Jobs saw his greatest creation not at any single product, but the system that he built. And I think Jobs was a more flamboyant character and personality, so people connected to that. And Tim Cook is a less flamboyant, less hungry for publicity character. But if you look at what Apple has done, they've created some pretty amazing products that
And some innovations are very splashy and some innovations are very important, but you don't see them. Jobs' introduction of the iPod was flashy, but actually one of his most critical innovations was to close the Apple ecosystem. That's not a very sexy phrase or you don't even know, what are you talking about?
But if you go back to what he did when he came back to Apple the second time in 97, Apple had opened up its ecosystem and everybody was making Apple clones and they were really struggling. And he paid a lot of money to shut that down, take all those licenses away right off those contracts.
And what that did was it created a walled off garden where they could do what they wanted and they could create an environment that they optimized for their customer. It's easy to say, oh, the iPod was kind of flashy and the iPhone was kind of flashy. Many of his flashy things didn't work. The next cube before Apple was a disaster and many of his other ideas were disasters.
But actually some of the biggest breakthroughs that he did were the non-flashy things like closing off the ecosystem, charging 99 cents for a song at the time when Napster was out there and everybody thought that was a stupid idea because you could just pirate songs for free. People just didn't understand that there were some other things going on.
Once they launched that idea, people wanted the security. So the message is Apple has done a lot of things under Tim Cook because Tim Cook, I think, kept a lot of the same system that Jobs had. And Apple has done a lot of things underneath the hood that have been very important for their business.
And one of the things I talk about Love Your Artist and Soldiers equally, well, Jobs saw himself as this ultimate artist and designer, and he got really into the fonts and look, and he worked very closely with Johnny Ive about design. And so that's kind of the world that he was coming from.
But he had learned in this interim period between his first time at Apple and his second time at Apple, he had learned from the movie business, Pixar, that you have to combine artists with soldiers. And in the movie business, you have directors and writers who are the artists and actors. But there's no movie if you don't have a producer and a budget and money.
So every movie is a lesson in combining artists and soldiers. And he brought that back to Apple. And so he encouraged beautiful artistry and beautiful design with Johnny Ives Group. But one of the first thing he did was bring in a guy way back from Compact Computer who was known as the Attila the Hun of inventory.
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Chapter 7: What are the key factors that hinder innovation in big companies?
And what's helped me is that I look for the best and most interesting and most fun in each world that I've been in, whether it's the physics world or the entrepreneurial world or the big business world, and look at what's interesting in each of those worlds and cross borders between those worlds. Most people stay in one world, play in one sandbox with one set of rules.
And when you're willing to liberate yourself and try to cross worlds, you can find a lot of ideas and power and energy. The third takeaway would be let curiosity be your superpower in every area of life, professionally, but also personally.
This has been wonderful. Safi, I really enjoyed our conversation and your book, Loon Shots. Thank you.
Thanks very much, Lynn.
I hope you enjoyed today's conversation with Safi Bakal. If you're interested, we have two related episodes, episode 161 with Harvard Business School's Amy Edmondson on failing well, and also episode number 28 on Amazon. The episode is Working for Jeff Bezos and the Secrets of Amazon's Success.
If you're enjoying the podcast, and I really hope you are, please review us on Apple Podcasts or Spotify or wherever you get your podcasts. It really helps get the word out. If you're interested, you can also sign up for the 3 Takeaways newsletter at 3takeaways.com, where you can also listen to previous episodes. You can also follow us on LinkedIn, X, Instagram, and Facebook.
I'm Lynn Toman, and this is Three Takeaways. Thanks for listening.
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