Entrepreneurs’ Most Important Decisions Come from Intuition and Imagination, Not Rational Calculation—Wan Weigang

Entrepreneurs’ most important decisions do not rest on science and reason, nor are they the sort of decisions described in economics and management theory. They rest on intuition and imagination. Before Elon Musk built rockets, rockets were considered the business of national agencies such as NASA, not something private companies should contemplate. Musk insisted on building his own rockets to get humanity to Mars sooner. That led him to reinvent rockets from first principles. Before GPT-3, even AI experts generally did not consider large language models a particularly promising direction. But Samuel Altman was convinced, because he had to achieve artificial general intelligence (AGI) to realize his ambition of systematically changing the world. Why did Marc Benioff found Salesforce? How did he think of developing cloud-based customer relationship management software? Because he had a dream! In Chongxin Lijie Qiyejia Jingshen (“Rethinking Entrepreneurship”), economist Zhang Weiying recounts an occasion when Zhou Hongyi of Qihoo 360 reviewed a young entrepreneur’s business plan and said the idea would not work. Listening nearby, Zhang observed that Zhou saying it would not work did not mean it actually would not. After all, when Zhou started his own business, everyone had said he would fail too! Zhou himself said, “Since becoming an entrepreneur, I have made no decision that others viewed favorably.” Of course, actually getting things done requires science and reason. But entrepreneurs’ role is to initiate a vision beyond normal operations—to discover new possibilities, precisely what Stephen Wolfram calls the highest form of human work. Such decisions are an art, not a technical skill. Why can entrepreneurs do this? Because the world contains not only ordinary risk, with known probabilities, but also the uncertainty brought by new things, for which there is no prior experience and which cannot be quantified: what is called “Knightian uncertainty.” Entrepreneurs’ task is not to adapt to risk but to create uncertainty; not to rationally assess the odds within the current game, but to break it open, introduce an X factor, and create an entirely new game. #WanWeigangEliteDailyLessons5