Agassi talks about an inspirational encounter with renowned author Jim Collins, who told him about three circles of questions that would help him find happiness. These include: 1) What are you passionate about? 2) What are you best at in the world? and 3) What is the economic driver?

Transcript



And a lot of people go out in trying to find what's the next thing you're going to do. And so, what I did was I ran in Jim Collins in my life. Jim Collins is a professor here and he defines these three circles that you need to sort of coincide in order for you to be, I believe, to be happy. One of them is a question about what your passion is. What are you really passionate about? Because if you're not passionate about something it's really hard to wake up in the morning and go do it everyday for 15 years. And so I asked my question, "What am I really passionate about in life?" And I came back with a set of things that was totally different than just beating Oracle or just building yet another version of software. I was born in Israel; I feel a huge debt to Israel. I was very passionate about Israel. I mean, I get really annoyed when I hear news, bad news coming from Israel. So, that means I'm passionate. I'm very, very passionate after seeing Al Gore on stage live here at Stanford about climate change. And I'm very passionate about making sure my kids know what to do with their life when they grow up. So, I've looked at these things and I say, "Okay, how do you do something about peace in the Middle East? Climate change? All these things? Big passions? Huge questions?" Second question is, "What are you the best at in the world?" So, I asked that question, "What really am I best in?" And it's not just, I didn't think it was to do software. What I'm really good at is taking really big problems and breaking them into a lot of small problems, solving the small problems or finding people who can solve the small problems and then putting it back together into a whole system. I'm a problem solver. And so, I said, "Okay, what technological problem can you solve that affects peace in the Middle East and climate change?" And the last question is the economic driver. And I'm not economically driven anymore by making more money. But when I'm economically driven is by making a business that makes a lot of money so that it scales by itself, it's sort of a self funding model. So, that's the third piece.

1. Success, Failure and Timing
2. Importance of Money
3. Physics of a Startup
4. Three Circles of Happiness

Shai Agassi lectures on Entrepreneurship for Stanford University students, April 25, 2007. Shai Agassi was a member of the Executive Board of SAP AG until March 31, 2007. He is responsible for the global development efforts for all SAP products and SAP's portfolio of industry-specific solutions. In this Stanford lecture, he talks about the importance of money and discusses succes, failure and time.



Course Details:

- Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture

- Stanford University's Entrepreneurship Corner (ecorner)



Original Course Name: Entrepreneurial Thought Leaders Lecture.