Book summary “BOLD”: summary

Introduction

You live in an era where linear planning leaves you perpetually behind a rapidly accelerating world. Traditional organizations struggle to keep pace because human brains naturally expect steady, incremental change instead of exponential acceleration. When your business relies on old assumptions, you miss the profound disruptions reshaping every global market.

Exponential technologies, psychological scale tools, and crowd-powered mechanisms allow small groups of entrepreneurs to solve global challenges and build billion-dollar ventures.

Peter H. Diamandis and Steven Kotler present a comprehensive blueprint for achieving massive scale through three distinct parts. The first section examines exponential technologies that disrupt legacy industries. The second part explores the psychology of bold thinking required to sustain high-risk ventures. The final section details how crowdsourcing and incentive competitions unlock unprecedented capital and talent.

You can navigate these concepts by considering several questions:

• How do technological trends transform from deceptive growth into disruptive forces?
• What mental frameworks separate incremental thinkers from breakthrough innovators?
• How do you leverage crowds and communities to execute ambitious projects?

1. Exponential Technologies and Disruption

Exponential technological progression follows a chain reaction known as the Six Ds: digitalization, deception, disruption, demonetization, dematerialization, and democratization. These stages describe how once a process is digitized, it undergoes a deceptive phase of slow-seeming growth before abruptly disrupting legacy industries. The final stages remove money and physical infrastructure entirely, making products and services accessible and affordable to nearly everyone.

Exponential technological progression follows the Six Ds framework, disrupting legacy industries and creating new markets for agile startups.

The Six Ds of Exponentials

Eastman Kodak failed because it misidentified its core business model and underestimated the exponential trajectory of digital cameras. Despite inventing the first digital camera in 1975, Kodak executives buried the technology because they feared it would cannibalize their lucrative chemical and photographic paper business. They failed to realize they were actually in the convenience and memory-recording business, leading to bankruptcy when digital technology disrupted the market.

Steven Sasson created the world's first digital still camera in 1975, which weighed 8.5 pounds and had a resolution of 0.01 megapixel. In 1996, Kodak had 140,000 employees and a $28 billion market cap, controlling 90 percent of the US film market and 85 percent of the US camera market. By 2007, Kodak stopped turning a profit, and in January 2012, Kodak filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy.

Exponential organizations achieve disproportionately large impacts compared to their small employee count by leveraging networks, automation, and crowdsourcing. Unlike twentieth-century linear organizations that required massive physical plants and workforces, modern startups use information technologies to scale rapidly and disrupt traditional industries with minimal overhead.

Instagram was founded by Kevin Systrom and Mike Krieger in October 2010, growing to 30 million users and a $1 billion acquisition by Facebook with only thirteen employees. Just 16 months passed from Instagram's founding to a $25 million valuation. In April 2012, Instagram for Android was released, downloading over a million times in one day and pushing Instagram's value to $500 million before Facebook bought it on April 9, 2012.

The Democratization of Manufacturing

Open-sourcing product development through crowdsourcing eliminates traditional manufacturing bottlenecks and drastically reduces time-to-market. By allowing communities to vote on, design, and refine product ideas online, platforms can shepherd concepts from prototypes to retail shelves in months rather than years.

Ben Kaufman founded Quirky in 2009 to make invention accessible, raising $79 million and launching hundreds of products like Pivot Power. Kaufman had borrowed $185,000 to take his first invention to market. Today, Quirky boasts a community of 800,000 members and brings an invention to market in 4 months.

Additive manufacturing replaces traditional subtractive methods by building objects layer by layer from digital files, enabling complex, localized production without retooling. Charles Hull constructed his first 3-D printer in 1984, and additive manufacturing spent decades in a deceptive phase before exponential performance increases turned it into a major manufacturing disruptor.

Avi Reichental turned around 3D Systems by expanding its printer and material suites, and introducing push-button desktop versions like the Cube, which costs $1,299 today. Align Technology 3-D prints 65,000 distinct aligners every day for Invisalign, producing 17 million pairs of fully customized one-offs last year.

Off-world 3-D printing solves deep-space supply chain constraints by allowing parts and hardware to be manufactured on demand rather than launched from Earth. Because launch costs are extremely high and payloads must endure intense g-forces, printing plastic parts, electronics, and eventually entire habitats in space bypasses traditional mass and transportation limits.

Aaron Kemmer, Michael Chen, and Jason Dunn founded Made in Space during the Summer 2010 Singularity University Graduate Studies Program. With launch costs running roughly $10,000 per pound into space, Made in Space launched its first 3-D printer to the ISS in Fall 2014. The company expects to be able to print electronics aboard the ISS by 2025.

On-demand cloud 3-D printing democratizes custom manufacturing by eliminating the need for expensive physical molds, warehouses, and overseas mass production in industries like toys. Traditional toy manufacturing requires costly injection molds for every part, but cloud-based additive manufacturing lets creators design and print personalized products individually as they are ordered.

Alice Taylor quit her job at Channel 4 to found MakieLabs, using 3-D printers to custom-design and print dolls. The doll segment is worth $3.5 billion within a total toy industry of $34 billion. Alice Taylor's first printed doll stood 18 centimeters high and cost 220 pounds to produce.

2. The Five Exponentials Changing the World

Networks, infinite computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, and synthetic biology are converging to transform global service and biological industries.

Over seven billion smartphones and tablets exist today. Sensors are dropping in cost and increasing in volume, moving into everyday objects like cars, clothing, and appliances. Connected to expanding network speeds and capabilities, they generate massive streams of data used for real-time monitoring, information gathering, and automated actions. By 2020, 50 billion things will connect to the Internet, generating between 2013 and 2020 an estimated $19 trillion in value through the Internet-of-Things. Process optimization and resource consumption optimization drive this expansion.

General Electric places up to 250 sensors in each of its 5,000 leased jet engines to monitor health in real time and execute preemptive fixes.

Computing and Artificial Intelligence

Cloud providers allow you to instantly access massive computational infrastructure on demand without capital expenditure. Instead of seeking elegant algorithms, developers can use infinite computing to test every possible variation simultaneously. Rackspace and other cloud providers let you access scalable servers in minutes rather than waiting weeks to order and configure physical hardware. You can apply 10,000 CPUs simultaneously to solve a problem in one second.

Artificial intelligence has evolved past mere logical rules to master four fundamental service industry skills: looking, reading, writing, and integrating knowledge. Driven by machine learning and deep learning algorithms, AI systems now match or outperform humans in visual recognition, legal document analysis, automated report writing, and complex data synthesis. In 2011, traffic sign recognition algorithms achieved a 0.5 percent error rate compared to 1.2 percent for humans. Since 80 percent of jobs in America revolve around the service industry, these cognitive tools rewrite labor expectations.

Credit Suisse uses Narrative Science technology to analyze company data and automatically write financial research reports, tripling the volume produced.

Placing advanced AI platforms like IBM Watson on the cloud democratizes access to expert-level cognitive tools for startups and entrepreneurs. IBM uploaded Watson to the cloud and opened its API to developers, pairing it with specialized data sources like medical literature and patient outcomes to create powerful point-of-care assistants. IBM established a $100 million venture fund to back start-ups using Watson. Modernizing Medicine partnered with Watson and built its entire Watson-powered prototype in two weeks with guidance from IBM.

Robotics is shifting from caged industrial machines to agile, collaborative, and human-safe systems that are rapidly entering the global workforce. New robotic interfaces feature simple programming through guided imitation and built-in safety sensors that halt motion on contact, allowing robots to work alongside humans without physical barriers. Within two decades, 45 percent of American jobs face high risk of being taken by computers and robots. Digital Apparel plans to use Baxter robots to cut and stitch denim for custom-fitting jeans based on 3-D body scans.

Synthetic Biology and Longevity

Synthetic biology treats DNA as a programmable software code, accelerating faster than Moore's law and opening biotechnology to entrepreneurs. Genetic code can be manipulated digitally using user-friendly software interfaces akin to word processors, drastically reducing costs and development time for biological applications. Biotechnology is doubling in power and halving in price every four months. Sequencing billions of letters of a genome now costs $1,000 and takes only a few hours.

Carlos Olguin at Autodesk is developing Project Cyborg to allow high school students and entrepreneurs to program DNA as intuitively as using Facebook.

Human Longevity, Inc. leverages the convergence of genomics, infinite computing, machine learning, and stem cell therapies to tackle aging-related diseases. By combining lightning-fast genomic sequencing with AI analysis of petabytes of biological data and synthetic biology repair mechanisms, the venture aims to extend healthy human lifespans. Peter H. Diamandis, Dr. J. Craig Venter, and Dr. Robert Hariri founded Human Longevity, Inc. with $85 million in seed capital. This endeavor targets the $50 trillion locked up in the bank accounts of people over the age of sixty-five.

3. The Psychology of Bold Thinking

Achieving breakthrough results requires isolating innovation teams, setting high hard goals, aiming for ten-times improvements, and entering flow states.

Skunk Works and High Goals

Lockheed chief engineer Kelly Johnson formed a secret engineering team inside a rented circus tent next to a stinky plastics factory to build America's first jet fighter, shielding them from bureaucratic inertia and military red tape. Lockheed's Skunk Works delivered the P-80 shooting star military jet to the Pentagon in 1943 within 143 days, which was seven days ahead of schedule.

Psychologists Edwin Locke and Gary Latham discovered that clear, large goals direct attention and enhance resilience when values align with the desired outcome, creating total commitment. Gary Latham and Edwin Locke found in dozens of studies that setting goals increased performance and productivity by 11 to 25 percent.

Instead of spending years building a product in secret before a single massive launch, agile design uses minimum viable products to gather immediate consumer feedback and iterate continuously. Google released an early version of Gmail with only about three features to quickly gather user feedback and iterate based on real-world demand.

Once basic financial needs are met, intrinsic rewards such as autonomy, mastery, and purpose become vastly more effective motivators than traditional extrinsic rewards for complex tasks. Daniel Kahneman discovered that life satisfaction and happiness increase with income only up to $70,000, after which money stops being a major issue and intrinsic rewards take precedence.

Moonshots and Flow

Astro Teller explains that targeting a 10x increase forces innovators to throw out the rule book because incremental thinking keeps you locked in the status quo. Astro Teller heads GoogleX, Google's skunk works dedicated to moonshots ranging from artificial intelligence and robotics to space exploration and life extension.

Susan Wojcicki summarized Google's strategy into eight governance principles for innovation:

• Focus on the User.
• Share Everything.
• Look for Ideas Everywhere.
• Think Big but Start Small.
• Never Fail to Fail.
• Spark with Imagination, Fuel with Data.
• Be a Platform.
• Have a Mission That Matters.

Flow states increase productivity significantly. Top executives in business studies report being five times more productive when operating in flow.

4. Strategies and Mindsets for Scale

To launch an extremely unconventional or radical idea successfully, you must introduce it above the line of super-credibility so that audiences accept it instantly as fact. Ideas placed below the credibility line are dismissed. Credible ideas receive the benefit of the doubt over time, but super-credible ideas compel the human mind to immediately accept them as fact, shifting focus from probabilities to implications.

Successful exponential entrepreneurs operate above the line of super-credibility, reason from first principles, and protect the downside.

Peter Diamandis and Eric Anderson kept Planetary Resources secret for nearly three years, recruiting top space engineers from NASA's Mars Curiosity rover team and billionaire investors like Larry Page, Eric Schmidt, and Richard Branson to launch above the super-credibility line in 2012, following its cofounding in 2009.

You can follow specific practices to build this level of trust:

• Leverage familiarity by engaging people who watched you succeed with your last project.
• Slow down and build credibility by organizing intermediate steps like feasibility conferences rather than rushing for big funding.
• Let respected authorities and advisors present your plans and ideas to the world.

Executing Massive Moonshots

Breaking massive moonshots down into executable subgoals aligns risk with reward and builds the confidence necessary to maintain motivation. Big goals only increase motivation when the person setting them is confident in their ability to achieve them. Subgoals allow capital to arrive in discrete waves as the team proves its capability, mitigating risk incrementally.

When founding the International Space University, Diamandis and his cofounders broke their vision into five steps, starting with an initial 50,000 dollars raised for an MIT aerospace jobs fair and feasibility conference.

Billionaire Wisdom and Scale

Human brains evolved for a local and linear world, making it difficult to process scale, but exponential technologies allow small groups to impact a billion people. Exponential technologies provide physical leverage while psychological tools provide a mental edge, enabling entrepreneurs to think past linear limitations. Researchers analyzed 200 hours of video footage to identify eight mental strategies used by leaders like Musk, Branson, Bezos, and Page.

Reasoning from first principles allows entrepreneurs to boil things down to fundamental truths, protecting them from popular trends and errors. Elon Musk used first principles to calculate the raw material spot market costs of battery cells on the London metal exchange at 80 dollars per kilowatt-hour, realizing batteries could be built much cheaper.

5. Crowdsourcing and Crowdfunding

Global crowdsourcing networks and modern crowdfunding platforms unlock infinite labor and capital, transforming how modern enterprises are built.

Harnessing the Global Crowd

Crowdsourcing takes a function once performed by employees and outsources it via an open call to a large, undefined network of people. Jeff Howe and Mark Robinson coined this approach, which relies on peer-production to unlock massive global labor potential. Exponential crowd tools grow in power due to expanding online populations, improving communication technologies, and accessible foundational tech. The global online population is projected to grow from 2 billion to 5 billion or 7 billion people.

Jake Nickell and Jacob DeHart founded Threadless, outsourcing T-shirt design and voting to an online community, which led to over $20 million in annual profits.

Macrotask platforms enable you to connect with skilled service providers in developing economies to build entire companies. Matt Barrie merged multiple freelance sites into Freelancer.com, creating a marketplace where under-resourced entrepreneurs can hire global experts for complex tasks. Freelancer.com hosts 10 million users and 5.4 million jobs posted representing $1.39 billion in work across 234 countries and regions, with 75 percent of workers coming from India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and China.

Creative asset crowdsourcing platforms divide video production into phased competitions, yielding high-quality commercial content at low agency costs. James DeJulio founded Tongal, breaking projects into ideation, production, and distribution phases to let independent creatives compete and deliver professional ads. Colgate Palmolive ran a $27,000 challenge on Tongal for a Speed Stick ad, which performed so well it aired during the Super Bowl and scored high on the USA Today ad meter.

Dual-use crowdsourcing platforms capture wasted human attention and convert it into valuable digital work like book digitization or translation. Luis von Ahn created reCAPTCHA to use typed squiggles for digitizing old books, and later founded Duolingo to have language learners translate web pages. reCAPTCHA digitizes over 100 million words a day, processing 200 million CAPTCHA squiggles daily while utilizing 500,000 hours wasted daily on standard CAPTCHAs.

Microtasks involve breaking large aggregation projects into bite-sized units completed by a crowd for nominal payments. Platforms like Amazon Mechanical Turk and Fiverr let you post human intelligence tasks or micro-services to accomplish categorization and digital art creation rapidly. Peter Diamandis used Mechanical Turk to analyze 65 years of Time magazine covers, categorizing 3,000 articles for under $200 at five cents per categorization.

Operational assets such as algorithms, software architecture, and retail data collection can be crowdsourced to build data-driven exponential organizations. Platforms like TopCoder, Kaggle, and Gigwalk allow you to harness developers and everyday consumers to solve complex data problems and gather causal retail metrics. Deloitte Consulting used crowdsourced platform Gigwalk where consumers took store shelf photos for five to eight dollars per request to deliver causal data in less than an hour.

Successful crowdsourcing requires following specific operational rules:

• Do your research
• Just get busy
• Turn to the message boards
• Establish context and be specific
• Prepare your data set
• Qualify your workers
• Define clear, simple and specific roles
• Communicate clearly, in detail, and often
• Don't micromanage; have an open mind for new ways of thinking
• Pay to play—that is, go for quality first, then price
• Prepare for the flood
• Be open to new working methodologies

Capitalizing via Crowdfunding

Lack of capital is the primary reason new businesses fail, but crowdfunding transforms access to finance by tapping into a global network of backers. Roughly 27 million US businesses need capital at any given time, and 50 percent of new businesses fail within their first five years due to lack of capital. Global crowdfunding funds raised followed an exponential curve from $530 million in 2009 to $2.7 billion in 2012, with the market expected to reach $15 billion by 2015.

Crowdfunding is categorized into four main types based on what you receive in return:

• donation
• debt
• equity
• reward

Donation is digital charity suitable for social causes, while debt is peer-to-peer lending best for local community projects. Equity allows selling company stock online under SEC regulations, and reward offers a product or service presale in exchange for financial support. AngelList partnered with SecondMarket to allow smaller accredited investors to invest as little as $1,000 in startups alongside top investors.

Reward-based crowdfunding can generate massive capital and market validation after traditional venture capitalists reject a project. After being turned down by multiple VCs for $200,000, Eric Migicovsky turned to Kickstarter to fund the Pebble smartwatch, utilizing a low-tech pitch video and a tech blog launch partner. Eric Migicovsky and the Pebble team raised $10,266,845 from 68,929 backers in thirty-seven days on Kickstarter, later securing $15 million in VC backing.

Nonprofit and conceptual initiatives without a physical consumer product can achieve unprecedented viral success through compelling storytelling. Matthew Inman partnered with the Tesla Science Center and used Indiegogo to raise funds to save Nikola Tesla's final laboratory from demolition by telling his overlooked story through a humorous comic. Matthew Inman's campaign raised over $1.3 million from 33,000 backers in 102 countries.

Crowdfunding serves as a powerful community-building tool for radical, future-forward projects by offering unique digital perks like the space selfie. Planetary Resources needed a passionate community behind its asteroid mining mission and decided to crowdfund the ARKYD space telescope, raising $1,505,366 in funding from 17,614 backers in thirty-two days.

Beyond raising capital, crowdfunding provides market validation, customer acquisition, public relations benefits, and a paying community. Oculus Rift went from raising $2.4 million on Kickstarter to being acquired by Facebook for $2 billion in eighteen months.

Launching a successful campaign requires a rigorous, structured twelve-step execution process:

1. Choosing your crowdfunding idea (product, project, or service)
2. How much? Setting your fund-raising target
3. How long? Setting your campaign length and creating a schedule
4. Setting your rewards/incentives and stretch goals
5. Building the perfect team
6. Sharpen your ax: planning, materials, and resources
7. Telling a meaningful story (and using the right words)
8. Creating a viral video: three use cases, shareability, and humanization
9. Building your audience—the three As
10. Super-credible launch, early donor engagement, and media outreach
11. Week-by-week execution plan: engage, engage, engage
12. Make data-driven decisions and final tips

Large crowdfunding campaigns require a specialized team covering seven key roles to manage heavy labor and public attention. Raising six or seven figures requires filling mandatory and optional roles: the celebrity face, campaign manager, technical expert, graphic design lead, technology manager, PR manager, and super-connector. Before launching, you must actively build an authentic community of supporters categorized into affiliates, advocates, and activists. Planetary Resources created an army of core supporters called Planetary Vanguards, who drove nearly 50 percent of unique clicks on the first day of the ARKYD campaign.

Ryan Grepper's Coolest Cooler failed its first crowdfunding attempt trying to raise $125,000, but returned to break previous crowdfunding records by following key recovery steps:

• Fail forward by treating failed campaigns as real market feedback to iterate and improve
• Start with a crowd by engaging pre-existing fans and supporters from day one
• Create a high-quality mockup to build trust and show closeness to production
• Use targeted advertising on platforms like Facebook, YouTube, and LinkedIn based on buyer data

Ryan Grepper's ultimate Coolest Cooler campaign got 62,642 people to pledge $13,285,226.

6. Communities and Incentive Competitions

Building passionate communities and launching objective incentive competitions drive radical technological breakthroughs and solve grand challenges.

Clay Shirky defines the cognitive surplus as the free time people spend on things they care about. You can harness trillions of free hours by building dedicated communities around a massively transformative purpose or exponential technologies. Reputation economics leverages public profiles from eBay or StackOverflow to let you exchange value without traditional monetary friction.

Kevin Schawinski worked on the Galaxy Zoo project in 2007 to sort nearly a million galaxies from the Sloan Digital Sky Survey. It took Schawinski 10 hours a day for five days straight to sort 50,000 images, but users within twenty-four hours classified 70,000 galaxies an hour. Galaxy Zoo drew 150,000 participants classifying 50 million galaxies in its first iteration, later pulling in over 250,000 participants.

Local Motors was founded by John Jay Rogers to build open-source cars. The community of 130,000 active members and 1,000,000 lurkers built the first Rally Fighter using a collective of a meager 500 people.

Jack Hughes founded TopCoder with an initial community of 25,000. A community of 400,000 computer programmers from 70 countries helped analyze immune system genes, bringing in 100 entries in a two-week contest where 16 entries outperformed the National Institutes of Health algorithm for just 6,000 dollars.

Stages of Community Building

You must pass through specific stages when building a community:

• Just get started—design something authentic.
• Navigation. Take DIY Drones as a model where a big welcome box and clear usage directions are prominently displayed.
• Simple Registration. Ask for an email, state exactly what is received, promise not to resell data, and provide an easy way to invite friends.
• The Information. Post content designed to meet a sense of belonging, support network, greater influence, and curiosity.
• Recognition. Highlight popular content, short descriptions, and larger pictures of posting members.
• Scalability. Provide members a way to break into smaller groups to steer the inherent messiness.

You should handpick your first ten to fifteen members and aim for 150 members as the threshold where self-sustaining conversations begin.

Designing Incentive Competitions

Incentive competitions combine exponential technologies, crowdsourcing, and crowdfunding to brutally and objectively solve grand global challenges by focusing strictly on results.

The Orteig Prize offered 25,000 dollars for the first solo transatlantic flight, inspiring nine teams to spend 400,000 dollars and culminating in Charles Lindbergh's historical flight that launched the $300 billion global aviation market. The Ansari XPRIZE used a $10 million purse to force a new generation of entrepreneurs to reinvent space flight.

Team Elastec/American Marine won the Wendy Schmidt Oil Cleanup XCHALLENGE by achieving an 89.5 percent oil recovery efficiency and cleaning up 4,670 gallons per minute. The challenge required a 2,500 gallons per minute minimum oil recovery rate and a 70 percent minimum oil recovery efficiency from 350 preregistered teams across 27 submitted designs inside a 2.7 million gallon salt water test tank.

The Netflix Prize offered a $1 million purse for a 10 percent improvement over Cinematch, attracting 40,000 teams from 150 countries by 2009. Graham Weston used HeroX to launch the $500,000 San Antonio Mx Challenge with a 24-month duration.

You can follow these practices when designing challenges:

• Keep trying boxes until you find one that catalyzes your thinking.
• Use time limits to force rapid decision-making and trial of new paths.
• Establish a clear, bold target that requires throwing out past experiences and starting fresh.
• Strive for simple, measurable, and objective rules with a clear finish line.
• Define the problem to be solved, not the solution to be implemented.
• Choose an appropriate structure such as past-the-post or a bake-off with a minimum performance threshold.
• Launch above the line of super-credibility with gold-plated endorsers and maximum media exposure.
• Incorporate a back-end business model so teams can recoup investments and launch new industries.

10 Key Ideas

1. Exponential technological progression follows the Six Ds framework, disrupting legacy industries and creating new markets for agile startups.
2. Networks, infinite computing, artificial intelligence, robotics, and synthetic biology are converging to transform global service and biological industries.
3. Achieving breakthrough results requires isolating innovation teams, setting high hard goals, aiming for ten-times improvements, and entering flow states.
4. Successful exponential entrepreneurs operate above the line of super-credibility, reason from first principles, and protect the downside.
5. Global crowdsourcing networks and modern crowdfunding platforms unlock infinite labor and capital, transforming how modern enterprises are built.
6. Building passionate communities and launching objective incentive competitions drive radical technological breakthroughs and solve grand challenges.
7. Eastman Kodak failed because it misidentified its core business model and underestimated the exponential trajectory of digital cameras.
8. Elon Musk used first principles to calculate the raw material spot market costs of battery cells on the London metal exchange at 80 dollars per kilowatt-hour, realizing batteries could be built much cheaper.
9. Planetary Resources needed a passionate community behind its asteroid mining mission and decided to crowdfund the ARKYD space telescope, raising $1,505,366 in funding from 17,614 backers in thirty-two days.
10. The Orteig Prize offered 25,000 dollars for the first solo transatlantic flight, inspiring nine teams to spend 400,000 dollars and culminating in Charles Lindbergh's historical flight that launched the $300 billion global aviation market.