10xDNA – Mindset for a thriving Future

By Frank Thelen and Markus Schorn

Digitalization was just the beginning, the biggest revolution for mankind starts now Flying cars, autonomous driving, 3D-printed houses and lab-grown meat - what sounds like a science fiction movie, is already a reality. We are on the verge of a new age. Building upon digitalization, technologies like artificial intelligence, 5G, robotics, quantum computing and synthetic biology will bring profound changes to the world we know today. The impact on our everyday lives and our economy will be immense. The Internet-Era alone created companies worth over 7 trillion dollars - but only the US and China reaped the benefits. The upcoming era of exponential progress offers many new opportunities. Europe needs a mindset shift, a unique 10xDNA to take advantage of these prospects. 10xDNA will inform and inspire those who wish to understand how our world will change in the next decade. Instead of fearing the unknown, we should embrace the opportunities to build a strong, fair and diverse Europe. Are you ready to unleash your 10xFuture?

• Language: English
• Publisher: Frank Thelen
• Release date: Nov 24, 2020
• ISBN: 9783982176437

Book preview

THIS BOOK IS DEDICATED TO THE 10x THINKERS. THE VISIONARIES AND MOVERS & SHAKERS WHO VIGOROUSLY DRIVE INNOVATION AND TECHNOLOGICAL PROGRESS THROUGHOUT EUROPE.

Frank Thelen is a European serial entrepreneur, technology investor, TV personality and best-selling author, who since 1994 has served as founding chief executive of several companies that utilized new technologies to deliver unique and outstanding products and services. As the founder and CEO of Freigeist Capital, Frank focuses on unleashing European Tech founders with his experience, network and capital. His own products have improved the lives of 100+ million customers in 60+ countries around the world. In 2018 Frank published his autobiography, Startup-DNA, which became one of the most succesful non-fiction books of the year. He was the first investor in companies like Lilium Aviation, Xentral, Wunderlist, Air Up, Ankerkraut and YFood.

Markus Schorn has been dealing with the fundamental effects of technological progress on Western society in general and business enterprises in particular throughout his career. His activities and accomplishments center around the interactions and interrelationships between the worlds of technology and business. Markus has successfully guided the market launch of a number of groundbreaking innovations, using a broad range of business models for both enterprises and consumer segments. Thanks to these achievements, he has become a highly regarded adviser for corporate decision-makers, and a mentor for German startups.

Table of Contents

Foreword

How the Moon Landing started the 10x Revolution

The US vs. China: Silicon Valley vs. The Chinese Dream

10x — The Background

The 10x Technology Kit

Artificial Intelligence

Robots & Automation

Blockchain & DLT

5G, Edge Computing & IoT

3D Printing

Synthetic Biology & CRISPR-cas

Energy

Era 3.0: Quantum Computing, Nuclear Fusion, Brain Appstore, Singularity

Mobility: Autonomous Driving, Flying Cars, Hyperloops

Food: Labgrown Meat, Hacking Yeast, Vertical Farming

Healthcare: Eliminating Diseases, Stopping the Aging Process

Humanity 2.0: Augmented Intelligence, Cyborgs, Biohacking

Walk the Talk: The 10x Startups in Freigeist’s Portfolio

The 10x Mindset: Courage, Dread, Bold Moves

The 10x Methods: Serendipity, FPT, The Medici Effect

Brilliant Minds

Acknowledgments

Foreword

While writing my first book Startup-DNA, I initially became aware of the era of exponential progress we’re entering. Not only one, but several disruptive technologies will soon bring profound changes to our personal lives as well as all industries. My first book was a rags-to-riches tale of how I went from being a drop-out at school and a down and out failure in the business world to becoming a leading startup entrepreneur and seed-capital investor. My initial aim in writing about new technologies was solely to describe how they work and cite a few compelling illustrative examples. But then one day I realized that if my observations in the book were accurate, they could potentially have far-reaching effects: notably European technology companies being reduced to the status of mere data suppliers for the US and China.

When Startup-DNA was published in late 2018, it was already clear to all attentive that Europe had long since become at best a second-rate player when it came to the internet and cloud computing. In contrast to the US and China with their countless IT mega-corporations, in my own country, Germany, no IT company of any importance had emerged since the founding of SAP back in 1972. And yet, no one seemed to be too concerned about it when I wrote that this was only the beginning of a highly significant trend. For as it turns out, the next wave of new technologies, which are part of my 10x Technology Kit, are bound to take on even greater importance. Even nowadays, the vast majority of our industry leaders and politicians are acutely unaware of disruptive technologies' immense power and exponential progress. The figures speak for themselves. In January 2020, Tesla’s market capitalization amounted to $100 billion and, for the first time, exceeded that of Germany’s leading automaker. Only a month later, the gap was so large that the combined market capitalization of VW and BMW was lower than that of Tesla. In September 2020, the market cap of Tesla reached $400 billion. Thus, not only had Germany’s IT sector missed the boat when it came to utilizing advanced technologies such as the internet, cloud computing and smartphones – but also, for the first time, the country’s flagship industry’s leading position was being taken over by an upstart disruptive player.

As a German who loves his country, and cheers for the European Union, I strongly feel that the world needs at least three great powerful voices to come up with fair and equitable solutions for the tremendous challenges humankind is facing today. If the world continues to be a place where the discourse on fighting climate change and regulatory measures for artificial intelligence are left solely to two great powers – the US and China – I fear that the responses to these existential matters will often be shortsighted. We need a strong and united Europe to have a say in these critical discussions and rulings. But Europe runs a serious risk of relinquishing this status within the next decade.

I have decided to do what is possible, within my limited power, to change this situation. My venture capital firm Freigeist only invests in Startups, which have the potential to support Europe in regaining and maintaining its position as a major economic force – every Startup must tackle a major challenge and work on a scalable and meaningful solution. My aim and passion in life is to contribute to the development of an urgently needed thriving European Technology Ecosystem.

In this book, we discuss the methods, the mindset and underlying technologies of the generation 10x. We wrote this book for readers who want to understand these new and disruptive technologies. We want to show how you can make the most out of these opportunities in your private and professional life. We want to encourage founders, decision-makers, politicians, teachers and everybody who wants to contribute, ensuring that Europe remains a strong voice when global issues of utmost importance are discussed.

On July 20, 1969, Neil Armstrong became the first person to set foot on the moon – and the moving, immortal words he uttered at that incredible moment have echoed around the world and down through the years: That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind. But what most people don’t know is that taking this small step involved years of extensive R&D – and ultimately gave birth to a new paradigm: 10x.

During the 1950s and 1960s, the US and USSR were engaged in a bitterly contested space race, in which the Soviets had been the leading player for quite a while. With the launch of their Sputnik satellite in 1957, the Russians became the first to put a man-made object into orbit. And in that same year, they put the first living creature, a dog named Laika, into orbit in a space capsule. Four years later, Yuri Gagarin became the first human being to orbit the earth.

On May 25, 1961, President John F. Kennedy, fearing that the US were going to lose the space race, announced before a special joint session of Congress the dramatic and ambitious goal of sending an American safely to the Moon before the end of the decade.

At the time, this moonshot, as it came to be called, seemed like wishful thinking, an impossible dream, more than anything else. And still today, some people believe that the moon landing never actually happened. It’s hard to imagine how NASA’s employees must have felt when President Kennedy assigned them this Herculean task. Just imagine for a moment, how you might react if the head of your organization asked you to take on what at first glance seemed like an insurmountable challenge. Would you immediately give him a laundry list of reasons why there was no way you or anyone else could ever hope to succeed? Or would you accept the challenge and do everything in your power to find a solution?

Well, as is well known, NASA adopted the latter approach – although the chances of succeeding seemed extremely dim at first. The rockets NASA had at its disposal weren’t nearly powerful enough to carry a command module containing three astronauts, plus a lunar module and sufficient fuel and supplies to make the trip to the Moon and back. At the time, German-born rocket specialist Dr. Wernher von Braun observed that for a moonshot to be successful, the rockets needed would have to be ten times (10x) more powerful than those currently available. In other words, Dr. von Braun felt that the moonshot was a mission impossible. But President Kennedy was determined to succeed – and expressed his unshakable faith in the moonshot in his now famous 1962 Moon speech, in which he stated, in ringing tones, We choose to go to the Moon. We choose to go to the Moon in this decade and do the other things, not because they are easy, but because they are hard.

And so, NASA set about using all the resources at its disposal to make Kennedy’s dream of a moonshot a reality. When the project was in full swing, more than 400,000 R&D specialists and other engineers, as well as mathematicians, were giving their all in the interest of coming up with revolutionary new solutions. The US plowed around 2.5% of its GDP into R&D for these new technologies – $25 billion annually, the equivalent of quadruple that amount in today’s dollars. This massive investment of financial and human resources not only paved the way for the moon landing, but also gave rise to completely new industries. The offshoots and ramifications of the solutions that the many brilliant minds who made the moonshot possible came up with are still affecting us today; for example, MIT Draper Laboratory director Margaret Hamilton developed the on-board flight software for the Apollo program. She coined the term software engineering and developed new approaches for system architecture and end-to-end testing. Today, software development entails not only creation of the relevant applications, but also of the attendant code – which undergoes a massive number of pre-release test scenarios and checks, to ensure that the software runs smoothly and is glitch-free.

Robert Noyce of Fairchild Semiconductor and Jack Kilby of Texas Instruments developed integrated circuits (microchips) for the Apollo project. Without these components, it would not have been possible to control and monitor the various Apollo rocket systems and navigate the Apollo space capsules. Kilby and two other scientists were awarded the Nobel Prize in Physics for this work. Robert Noyce and Gordon Moore founded a company called Integrated Electronics, or Intel for short, in what later became known as Silicon Valley. Today virtually every electronic device, from vacuum cleaners to headphones, depends for its operability on one or more microchips.

The Apollo project created a biotope, it was the cradle for engineers, entrepreneurs and scientists who sincerely believed that almost any goal was achievable. And it is precisely this mindset that can pave the way for groundbreaking discoveries.

R&D stands for Research and Development. There are R&D departments in most companies which are dedicated to focus their time and energy on future strategies and new product developments.

End-to-End Testing ensures a smooth flow of an application from start to finish. The purpose of end-to-end testing is to simulate the real user scenario and to verify the function of the system under test and its individual components.

The US vs. CHINA

10xDNA and Silicon Valley

The Apollo project was the first genuine 10x project. Many of the brilliant men and women who participated in the project went on to start their own companies and commercialized the technologies they’d developed. But more importantly, these technological pioneers collectively gave birth to a new mindset: think bigger - Moonshots are possible!

These individuals eventually made their homes in cities that fell within the catchment area of Stanford University, such as Mountain View, Palo Alto and Cupertino – and brought their 10xDNA along with them. The family tree of many major companies such as Google, Cisco and Nvidia is directly linked to the founders of Fairchild Semiconductor and thus to the Apollo project.

Robert Noyce became a father figure and mentor for the young Steve Jobs, whom he gave valuable support during Apple’s startup phase.

Other Fairchild alumni founded venture capital firms such as Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia, which to this day are leading startup financiers. Kleiner Perkins was among the earliest investors in Google, Amazon and Spotify, while Sequoia invested in startups such as PayPal, YouTube and WhatsApp. The seed capital they provided played a major part in the success of companies whose products and services are used today by millions of people around the world.

An ethos developed that fostered – and richly rewarded – thinking as far as possible outside the box, along with a mindset that was relentlessly in search of the next great leap forward, and that never settled for minor optimizations. Today, 10x is a permanent fixture in the culture of many Silicon Valley companies. Whereas most CEOs are content with 2-3% optimization per year, Silicon Valley leading lights such as Google founder Larry Page are not. For Page, 10x has become a watchword, a mantra, an ironclad tenet for the conduct of his organization’s affairs – and even a 10% improvement is tantamount to mere coasting and resting on one’s laurels. As Page sees it, the only way to outdo the competition by a factor of 10 – and achieve real progress – is to think exponentially and break new ground. A prime example of 10x in action can be found in the 2004 market launch of Gmail. Google’s exponential innovation was to offer Gmail users 1 gigabyte of free email storage space – 250 times more than its competitor, Yahoo. However, the catch was that, due to data storage costs amounting to around $4 per gigabyte back then, and with 100 million envisaged users, Google stood to lose a sizeable chunk of change. No sane financial controller of a conventional corporation would have ever green-lit such a folly, fearing to lose his job. But imbued as it was with the 10x ethos, the Gmail team put on their 10x think ahead/think optimistically caps – which enabled them to foresee that technological progress in data storage capacity would greatly reduce the attendant costs. As it turned out, they were right.

I think it’s important to reason from first principles rather than by analogy. The normal way we conduct our lives is we reason by analogy. [With analogy] we are doing this because it’s like something else that was done, or it is like what other people are doing. [With first principles] you boil things down to the most fundamental truths…and then reason up from there.

Elon Musk

Gmail’s user base expanded exponentially, while simultaneously data storage costs declined precipitously, to a few cents per gigabyte. As a result, Gmail became an enormous cash cow, with today over 1.5 billion users.

Another key proponent of the 10x paradigm is Elon Musk, whose preferred method for coming up with radical new solutions is called first-principles thinking. First, Musk breaks down major challenges into their constituent elements. Then, he and his teams set about rethinking these various elements from the ground up, using new technical methods. Instead of focusing on how something has been done so far, Musk asks himself the following question: What is technically feasible, given the current state of advancement in the fields of physics and chemistry, and the laws governing these disciplines?

For example, in 2002 Musk founded SpaceX, whose avowed purpose, according to the company’s website, is to revolutionize space technology, with the ultimate goal of enabling people to live on other planets. To achieve this goal, SpaceX is developing reusable rockets, which will radically reduce the price of space travel.

First Principles Thinking describes a method of thinking in which a problem is broken down to its fundamentals. Based on these fundamentals alone, the best approach is sought. You must deliberately ignore methods and procedures that have been used up to now and focus on new approaches or technologies that should be technically, physically or chemically possible.

It’s often easier to make something 10 times better than it is to make it 10 percent better.

Astro Teller, Google X

Musk’s initial plan – to buy and recondition decommissioned Russian space program rockets – went awry; but instead of giving up, he broke space-travel rockets down into their principal constituent elements – namely aerodynamics, thermodynamics and engines. Armed with this schema, Musk’s team came up with a way to build rockets using inexpensive off-the-shelf components.

This approach enabled SpaceX to reduce the per-payload-kilogram cost of firing up a rocket from $18,500 to less than $3,000.

10x and Google X

Alphabet (formerly Google) took the 10x paradigm to unprecedented heights. Alphabet adopted a revolutionary new approach that set the company apart from its competitors, which were busily establishing R&D teams in the hope of driving innovation for their core businesses. X (aka the Moonshot Factory) is a division of Google whose mission is to generate moonshot-based businesses for Alphabet by developing radical