Business & Innovation Q&A for Young Entrepreneurs & Others (March 3, 2021)

The Stephen Wolfram Podcast

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business and innovation as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions include: Can you give us some insights into how you scaled up Wolfram, and what important issues / questions you had to tackle or what significant lessons you learned? - Are there cultural biases that you have had to overcome for breaking any prior limits in the possibilities of your activities? - How did you find your first employees? Did you have to go to a lot of places to find them? - Partner vs employee is a really interesting distinction to discuss - employees complete tasks, partners identify tasks worth investing in? - How do you deal with individuals who are strongly convicted that they are knowledgeable on a matter but actually have no idea what they are talking about? - Jim Cramer talked on Lex about political games Steve Jobs and his people played, a kind of high level thing. What does that really mean? - In the beginning, how many of your decisions about the company were gut instinct/market research/customer feedback/something else? - ​Is it possible to earn money doing free software? What is "Open Source" good for from your perspective? - How do you assess people to figure out their niche?