A round of applause for Larry Gennari and his partners at GALaw Partners in Needham for organizing an engaging and educational day for the faithful and new followers of the Authors and Innovators conference.   Larry’s choice of authors and thoughtful panel discussions were further enhanced by practical breakout sessions and a “working lunch” in this year’s conference.  The overall connecting theme was “The resilient entrepreneur.”

Though I could not be there for the first session, I walked into the breakout on M & A – benefiting from the expert discussion on how to prepare to sell a company – particularly focused on smaller private entities with owners that need to lay the groundwork and then get into the right frame of mind to no longer be their own boss.

My first author session was an interesting two-person panel “Creating Space to Grow” – juxtaposing two authors with widely diverse points of view on the role of government in stimulating private enterprises and the workforce.   The “space discussion” with author Matthew Weinzierl, Space to Grow provided a clear distinction of the benefits of risk-sharing in this arena – opening up space innovation to the private sector while keeping appropriate funding in place from the government – citing that things like “basic science” the need for competition, and long term ROI are not in the interest of the typical venture capitalist or private investor. On the other hand – private investment has brought forward new ways of thinking and cost savings for key space building blocks such as launch pads, space stations, and asteroid mining.

The session on de-mystifying kicked off with a series of factoids about the US National gap between income ($5 Trillion) and spending ($6.8 Trillion) and the fact that the top 1% of wealth owners are worth $50Trillion and there’s no way to know how much of that number is taxable based on the labyrinth of outdated tax code.   While Ray Madoff’s book,  The Second Estate seeks to unbundle this conundrum, the other two authors on the panel were focused on the secrets of creating wealth via business building.   Easier said than done, Mike Magliochetti (Dancing Between the Toes of Elephants) crystallizes entrepreneurial success with three key attributes: having a “foundational” idea, a sustainable business; and having key growth levers.  But also deconstructs the “insiders” language of investors.  John Abrams (From Founder to Future) presented the concept of “worker cooperatives” as his choice for growing past the founding partners phase of growth.

The last two sessions featured 1:1 interviews with authors who focused on resiliency and innovation (Scott Anthony, Epic Disruptions) and Experimentation (Jeff Bussgang, The Experimentation Machine).  Anthony discussed various case studies both written and “to be written” to demonstrate that innovation requires “conviction grounded in data” whether it’s Florence Nightengale transforming nursing or Elon Musk transforming transportation.   Bussgang studied the “10X” founders and in his book he distills the “timely tools” and “timeless methods” behind businesses that have scaled successfully.  For example, finding the non-obvious opportunities.

Naturally, this discussion evolved into a robust debate about AI with an argument that if businesses don’t adopt, then their competitors will simply create AI native businesses.  

By comparison, in terms of technology growth:

• It took 80 years for electricity to be ubiquitious
• It took 7 years for the internet to reach 80M users
• It took 2 months for ChatGBT to reach 100B users.

And for the first time, a technology feeds itself – so there’s no telling how these numbers will explode! 

This is a very brief snapshot of a rich day of learning.  This is one of the most valuable days of eye-opening thinking you can enjoy.   Many thanks to all the authors,organizers, exhibitors, and sponsors.