The 300-Year American Entrepreneurial Miracle of the Modern Age
A miracle that brought the world the steamboat, the revolver, the sewing machine, blue jeans, the telephone, the light bulb, the electrification of the world, air conditioning,
airplanes, refrigeration, the photocopy machine, personal computers, the internet, social media, and e-commerce.
But the American Entrepreneurial Miracle of the Modern Age is also a story of individual men and women who made America great and forever changed the world.
This 14-part series brings together the remarkable history of American business excellence,
economic world dominance, and individual achievement.
Hello, I'm Dr. Alphonse Kiesley and welcome to the final episode of American Entrepreneurial Genius. Looking back over America's history, it is easy to see now that the country's progress is a result of constantly disrupting all businesses and technologies, opening the door to new businesses and technologies.
Businesses and technologies creating greater wealth and well-being for its citizens. We shall see in this program how entrepreneurial disruption has accelerated at brick-neck speed.
YouTube disrupted traditional electronic media, allowing everyone to tell their story to the entire world.
Among America's most cherished civil liberties are the freedom of speech and freedom of the press.
Although everyone in America enjoys these freedoms, until recently only a few have had access to the marketplace to publish their ideas.
That marketplace was concentrated in the hands of newspaper owners.
Then the operators of radio and TV stations and in the 1980s cable television brought in the 24-hour news channel.
However, ownership of these media channels was still in the hands of a few companies.
Then in February 2005, democratization of the American news media took a giant leap forward.
The American internet entrepreneurs Chad Hurley, Steve Chen and Javed Karin founded YouTube, a video sharing website where users can upload, view and share video clips.
The three Midwesterners, all in their late 20s, came up with the idea for a video sharing website while working for the e-commerce giant, PayPal.
Prior to working for PayPal, the three young men had very different upbringings.
Hurley, born in Pennsylvania in 1977, studied design at Indiana University of Pennsylvania.
Chen, a Chinese-American born in Taiwan in 1978, had immigrated to the US at the age of 15 and lived in Illinois.
Karin was born in East Germany in 1979 and escaped to West Germany with his family in 1981.
Both Chen and Karin studied computer science while attending the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.
Through venture capital, within a few months YouTube was up and running.
With headquarters situated above a pizzeria in Japanese restaurant in San Mateo, California, a year after launch, YouTube was the fastest growing website on the internet.
YouTube made it possible for anyone to post videos that millions of people could watch.
With the now universal smartphone video camera, anyone in the public eye was on tape, and instantly seen by millions on YouTube.
In addition, anybody with a serious point of view could post a video telling their story.
On October 9th, 2006, the company was purchased by Google for $1.65 billion in stock.
The acquisition made the original three founders of YouTube instant multi-millionaires.
Today, YouTube has been successfully monetized with over a billion users every day as people from all over the world watch hundreds of millions of hours of YouTube videos from its ever-expanding video sharing digital platforms.
Nobody typifies the new American entrepreneur better than Elon Musk.
It's rare when a person revolutionizes one business.
It's almost impossible that an entrepreneur could do it four times.
But that's what SpaceX, PayPal, Tesla Motors, and SolarCity founder Elon Musk did.
Elon Musk, who fancies himself as the real Ironman, was born on June 28, 1971 and raised in South Africa in an upper middle-class family.
Ten years later, he was recognized as a genius when, in 1981, he taught himself how to program.
Two years later, young Musk made his first software sale, a game he called Blastar.
Then in 1989 at 17, in a bold move, he departed for Canada to attend Queen's University of British Columbia.
Three years later, he was studying at the University of Pennsylvania where he graduated with undergraduate degrees in economics and physics.
From there, he moved to Silicon Valley, where the tech boom was beginning, and immediately became a part of it, launching his first company, Zip2 Corporation.
An online city guide, Zip2 was soon providing content for the new websites of both the New York Times and the Chicago Tribune.
And in 1999, a division of Compact Computer Corporation bought Zip2 for $307 million in cash and $34 million in stock options.
Rather than retiring, Musk was just beginning his entrepreneurial saga.
In 1999, he co-founded X.com, an online financial services and payments company.
An X.com acquisition the following year led to renaming the company PayPal.
PayPal changed the way the world bought things in a person-to-person transaction.
Instead of writing and mailing a check, a person could create a PayPal account and transfer money instantaneously using the Internet.
In October 2002, PayPal was acquired by eBay for $1.5 billion in stock.
Musk was even richer.
Not resting on his laurels, in the same year at the age of 31, Musk set his sights on revolutionizing and privatizing space travel.
When he found its space exploration technologies, known by its catch name SpaceX.
Using his own money, Musk's great insight was to build a better and cheaper rocket engine.
The result was that Musk figured out how to make space travel commercially viable.
In 2006, NASA awarded the company a contract to design and demonstrate a launch system to resupply cargo to the International Space Station.
They succeeded, and SpaceX, as of May 2015, has flown six missions to the space station.
Of course, Musk's long-term goal is to put a man on Mars.
Like many Silicon Valley entrepreneurs, Musk has embraced their ethos of make the world a better place, do no harm, and expand and preserve the human consciousness.
For Musk, that meant putting an end to our addiction to fossil fuels.
Rather than just sounding the alarm over climate change, he did something about it.
First, Musk, in 2006, provided the initial concept in funding for SolarCity, which was then co-founded by his cousins, Lyndon and Peter Rive.
As with his earlier enterprises, Musk found a better and cheaper way to manufacture and install solar panels.
At the same time, he initiated a new business model allowing homeowners to put up panels with a variety of leasing options.
By adopting solar power, SolarCity customers paid less each month than they previously paid for electricity from the utility company.
In 2015, Musk remained the company's largest shareholder in the process making SolarCity one of the largest suppliers of solar power systems in the United States.
Switching from sustainable energy creation to sustainable energy consumption, Musk moved on to the innovation and enterprise he is best known for.
Tesla Motors The development and manufacture of fast and beautiful electric cars.
Named after the brilliant inventor and entrepreneur Nikola Tesla, Tesla Motors was incorporated in 2003 by Martin Eberhart and Mark Tarpenning.
It was the first car company startup in the United States in 60 years, and the first ever Silicon Valley car startup.
As many have said, the electric car was based on electricity and computer chips, the purview of Silicon Valley.
With Musk as an investor, the company produced beautiful prototypes. However, its high cost put the company on the edge of bankruptcy.
But Musk, ever the risk taker, put virtually every last cent into saving the company, saying he couldn't let it die.
In 2008, taking control of the business, Musk brought all of his genius to bear by bringing in a new management team and leading research into new technologies and designs to make the electric car better and cheaper.
Using a government bailout loan, in 2012 Tesla began manufacturing and delivering to customers its Tesla Model S sedan.
By 2015, Tesla Motors had repaid its U.S. government loan with interest and was a darling on the stock market.
Tesla cars are a tremendous success story.
As for Elon Musk himself, still a young man, after revolutionizing for businesses, who knows where his entrepreneurial genius will take him.
Netflix disrupted how media is delivered to the home.
It's innate, it's wanting to push the edge, to create something that people are proud of and that they enjoy.
Read Hastings, American entrepreneur and innovative business disruptor.
More than anyone else, Read Hastings has revolutionized how the world is entertained.
It started in the early 21st century, when instead of making that trudging trip to the video store or watching network program television, people began to eagerly wait at their mailbox for that singular red package containing a DVD of a movie or TV show they wanted to watch.
Watch when and where they want it.
Neil Order's subscription video entertainment was the brainchild of Netflix founder, Read Hastings.
Interestingly, it was an idea that sprang from a painfully large late fee at a video store.
Read Hastings was born in Boston, Massachusetts on October 8th, 1960, where he grew up in an upper middle-class family.
After studying math at Bowdoin College, he joined the Marine Corps at the age of 21, but soon opted out for the Peace Corps where he taught math in Swaziland.
He returned to the U.S. enrolled in Stanford and received a graduate degree in computer science.
Hastings' first hit company, Pure Software, went public in 1995.
Using some of the $750 million he earned, he found it Netflix two years later and launched it as a monthly DVD subscription service.
Customers could keep up to three DVDs for as long as they want it.
Ten years later, now a full-fledged member of Silicon Valley and with 100,000 titles and 10 million subscribers, Netflix has virtually driven the old-style video rental store out of business.
But Hastings' entrepreneurial vision wasn't through yet.
Next, he moved Netflix to the online marketplace by offering on-demand streaming services of its hundreds of thousands of video titles.
By 2010, over half the traffic on the internet was taken up by Netflix, streaming titles to its subscribers.
In 2013, Hastings moved Netflix again into uncharted territory when it premiered its first original television series, House of Cards.
Rivaling traditional hit shows, the new series was nominated for a staggering nine prime-time Emmy Awards and went on to win three.
But most remarkably, Hastings put all 13 programs without commercials on his site the same day, allowing viewers to binge watch the entire first season.
In the process, he set a totally new precedent for television viewing as well as marketing.
Hastings has predicted that all television will be streamed through the internet in the near future.
Outside of business and entrepreneurial innovation, Hastings has been interested in philanthropy and education, serving on California's Board of Education and offering support to charter school organizations.
Jack Dorsey's Square disrupted **** buyers and sell his exchange money for purchases.
Like Apple's Steve Jobs before him, Jack Dorsey in 2015, reclaimed leadership of the company he helped create nine years earlier.
That company was Twitter. The internet's social networking short message service that enables users to send and read short 140 character messages called tweets.
Like many of America's 21st-century entrepreneurs, Jack Dorsey has a few simple principles that act as guidelines for his entrepreneurial efforts in companies, simplicity, constraint and craftsmanship.
Born in St. Louis, Missouri on November 19, 1976, Jack Dorsey from the beginning was unconventional, a dreamer, a punk rocker, a person who was inspired by surrealistic art, and who takes his personal philosophy of entrepreneurship from the science fiction writer, William Gibson.
And I found this great quote by William Gibson. Anyone know who William Gibson is just by show hands?
Unfortunately, too few. So William Gibson is a science fiction author, and he coined the term "cyberspace," he coined the term "cyberpunk" in a novel called "neuromancer."
And he has this great quote which I think really captures everything that we're trying to do in this world as entrepreneurs, as founders, as builders of companies and products and ideas.
And that the future has already arrived. It's just not evenly distributed yet.
Dorsey, like the new American entrepreneurs of the 21st century, like many of the entrepreneurs of the information in emerging systems age, moved on from creating one great business such as Twitter and create another.
In Jack Dorsey's case, that was revolutionizing mobile payment. In 2010, Dorsey developed a small business platform to accept debit and credit card payments on an electronic device called Square.
The small, square-shaped device attaches to mobile devices via the headphone jack and acts as a mini credit card reader.
Square is also a system for sending paperless receipts via text message or email, and is available as a free app for iOS and Android OS.
Undoubtedly, Square is just the beginning of the mobile future and undoubtedly the beginning of the future for Jack Dorsey.
Wikipedia and Craigslist not only disrupted two traditional businesses but put forth a new model for internet companies.
Internet entrepreneurial Mavericks Craig Newmark with Craigslist and Jimmy Wills with Wikipedia developed completely new paradigms for operating highly successful websites in the 21st century.
And in doing so, they epitomized the American economic disruptor and risk-taking entrepreneur.
These are entrepreneurs who, through innovation, created a new market-in-value network that disrupts and eventually replaces an existing market-in-value network,
while at the same time creating greater common good.
In fact, America has been a leader in disruptive innovation from its founding.
What had been a necessity to survive became an economic virtue.
From introducing the steamboat that replaced sailing ships, to the light bulb that replaced the candle,
to building cars that replaced the horse and buggy, to refrigerators that replaced the ice man,
to PayPal that replaced the written check,
American entrepreneurs continue to lead the way in building a better world for all.
Jimmy Wills and Craig Newmark share a common passion for disruptive innovation.
They also share another set of values.
No monetization of their sites through advertising always enhance the user experience and put intense focus on customer service.
Wikipedia, on the other hand, begins with a very radical idea.
And that's for all of us to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge,
and that's what we're doing.
Wikipedia is the brainchild of Jimmy Wills.
Relying on user-correcting wiki software, it is a free encyclopedia built collaboratively by largely non-paid anonymous volunteers.
Since its founding in 2001, Wikipedia has grown to become the largest free online reference source in the world,
with over 35 million articles in 290 languages.
Wikipedia's editors agree to a simple set of principles known as the five pillars developed by the community to describe best practices,
clarify principles, resolve conflicts, and otherwise further the goal of creating an improving of free reliable encyclopedia.
These pillars include Wikipedia is an encyclopedia.
Wikipedia is written from a neutral point of view.
Wikipedia is free content that anyone can use, edit, and distribute.
Since its inception, Wikipedia has totally disrupted the old hard copy information and encyclopedia business.
In 2015, not only was it the top information website in the world, but also it found its way to the top 10 most visited websites overall.
As for Wills himself, he enjoys the role of the country's most famous traveling spokesman for internet freedom.
Still resolving Wikipedia conflicts and hardly a Silicon Valley billionaire, he leads a relatively simple life.
Throughout the 20th century, the newspaper classifieds were a place where people and companies for a fee could place a notification to sell goods and services,
and perhaps most importantly, list job opportunities.
Craig Newmark stumbled upon an idea for disrupting this highly profitable business.
A brilliant software engineer, after he moved to the San Francisco area, he developed Craigslist in 1995 as an email distribution list to help his friends find departments.
Soon he saw that by using a website on the internet, he could expand Craigslist into a free marketplace where people could come together, largely without charge, and exchange information formerly found in classified ads.
Today the company is only supported by a small fee for posting job openings.
Twenty years after its founding, Craigslist covers the US and 74 countries with over 20 billion page views per month.
In 2015, Newmark was able to buy back the Craigslist shares that had fallen into the hands of eBay, guaranteeing the nonprofit status of his company.
Now Newmark has turned his attention to philanthropy, and like the Maverick he is, he's doing it his way.
My deal is I stumble across clauses, things that I believe in, and I find people who are really good at supporting those.
You know, it's an intuitive, somewhat haphazard process, but I guess it works for me.
I should add, there's nothing altruistic about this, I'm just doing what feels right, I'm just being in a way a nerd, because after you make enough to provide for your future, and maybe to help out friends and family, it's much more satisfying to make a difference.
Since its beginning, no other country has valued entrepreneurship more than America.
Empowered by private ownership, secured their inventions by contracts held sacred by the courts, buoyed by a foundation of reasonable taxes and low levels of regulation, and lionized by heroic stories of entrepreneurial success and virtue.
The American entrepreneur stands ready to open new worlds of knowledge and well-being, continued mastery over global competition, and driven to create an ever more exciting future of beauty and prosperity.
That is the Great American Entrepreneurial Spirit.
Thanks for watching American Entrepreneurial Genius, I'm Dr. Alphonse Keysley.
[Music]