How can you leverage the principles of physics to grow your business? In this episode, Rich sits down with Bob Rogers, CEO of Oii.ai and a PhD in physics who studied supermassive black holes. They discuss how Bob’s background as a scientist informs how he thinks about business, how to know when to pivot in a startup, and how cross-pollinating ideas from different domains leads to innovation for customers and patent-worthy ideas.

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“It’s literally just finding the right level of granularity and detail to tell your story effectively. And that's a physics concept, but it's also a storytelling concept, and it's a business concept for me.”

“I've seen a couple of organizations just, we're putting AI into this, this, this, and this. And it's like, ooh, it's a huge mistake. Because you really want to think of it as just another tool. It’s not like, oh, let's go hammer everything and see what happens, you wouldn't do that just because you got a new hammer, right?”

“The main thing is, every single person in your organization has patents inside them. That's the starting point. Start with that mindset. Everybody has patents inside them.”

“Here's the tricky thing about the pivot. When you're building a business, a bullseye is a two dimensional object, like X axis and Y axis. But in business, it's a multidimensional space. So you're pivoting two degrees in an unknown direction. You've got to figure out the orientation and the angle, which is why it's not simple.”

Practice Makes Profit segment: How to use a prioritization matrix.

The League of Strategic Minds segment [listener question]: What is the difference between strategic thinking and strategic planning?

Winsight: Idea for Advantage segment: Gary Kasparov, the world chess champion from 1985 to 200, said, “What separates a winner from a loser at the grandmaster level is a willingness to do the unthinkable. A brilliant strategy is certainly a matter of intelligence, but intelligence without audacity is not enough. You must have the guts to explode the game, to upend your opponent's thinking, and in doing so, unnerve them.” What are you doing to explode the game in your field? What are you doing? That's innovative. That's different. And that's going to upend your opponent's thinking.

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(00:42) Deep Dive Interview with Bob Rogers

(49:54) Practice Makes Profit

(52:05) The League of Strategic Minds

(53:50) Winsights, Ideas for Advantage

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