As someone who’s always looking for innovative ways to grow businesses, I was excited to sit down with Bob Rogers, the CEO of Oii.ai and a PhD physicist who studied supermassive black holes. We had a fascinating discussion on how his scientific background informs his business strategies, the critical moments when a startup should consider pivoting, and the power of cross-pollinating ideas from different disciplines to create customer-focused innovations and patent-worthy breakthroughs.
Key Quotes:
“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.”