You created your first company at 17, wrote your first best-seller book at 24 and won the “Innovator of the Year” by MIT’s TR-35 at 24. What comes next?
I believe there are giant opportunities around, which need someone to solve them. Only 1 out of 1.000 people who has the same problem wonders what he could do to fix it for everyone, while the other 999 try to avoid the problem or just fix it for themselves. And I think we can all become that 0,1%, with some specific training on detecting unsolved problems, thinking out of the box to fix them and (what is really important) being able to communicate those solutions properly.
And what would you say to those people who think that everything has already been invented?
There are lots of people who think that; many of them because they had an idea and later discovered it was already created, and many others just as an excuse to avoid trying to invent anything.
When someone comes and tells me “everything has been already invented”, I try to answer with objective statistics: In one second there are 4 babies born in the world. And in one second 12 smartphones are activated: Never before has the world been evolving so quickly, and never before have people had the powerful communication tools we have today, which is great… but also creates thousands of new unsolved challenges every day. Every new-born idea creates at least one new challenge to solve.
Communication is one of your biggest passions. How important is the communication process of an idea?
I’ve seen dozens of brilliant ideas fail just because they didn’t have a good communication strategy. Communication is not just ‘necessary’, it is one of the most beautiful parts of the innovation process: explain your ideas, try to convince others that your solutions are the right ones… We’re communicating from day one (the day when we have the idea) to the last day of the project’s life, and we should never forget that.
Let’s talk about technology. Your first company, eyeOS, was the first Cloud Computing based OS in the world. What’s next?
We’ve seen Cloud Computing fixing problems that were there 15 or 20 years ago, and today these technologies are making daily life easier for millions of people. I think now we should focus on reducing the number of machines doing the same job and, at the same time, learn how to improve the analytic capabilities of powerful servers. This is one of the principles of Big Data: gathering a lot of information, processing it and extracting conclusions that humans could never reach by themselves.
From another perspective, we’re seeing a new innovation world appearing with CrowdFunding: The ‘Machine to Machine’ and the ‘Internet of things’, combined with platforms such as KickStarter are letting students without any business background create amazing companies that would never have been founded by Venture Capitalists and are being funded directly by their first customers.
I’ve seen dozens of brilliant ideas fail just because they didn’t have a good communication strategy.
Pau García-Milà
5. Where do you find inspiration?
Atari’s founder once said “Everyone who’s ever taken a shower has an idea. It’s the person who gets out of the shower, dries off, and does something about it that makes a difference.” I find my inspiration in the daily routine, especially when I realize that someone, including myself, is doing the same thing one thousand times… complaining that he doesn’t like it more than 900.