Idealab Founder and CEO Bill Gross articulates two organizational ways his company develops motivation. The first is to ensure employees working on a new spin-off venture each have a true equity stake in the startup company. The second is to encourage risk-taking at Idealab through the company's willingness to shut down unsuccessful projects with no negative impact to employees. According to Gross, "If you really want to have some breakthrough new thing, you can't have someone worrying about their job being on the line, for trying something bold and new."

Bill Gross, Idealab's founder and CEO, shares his thinking on how to objectively compare ideas. While admitting it can be a challenge to do so, in this clip, Gross describes some of the criteria used at Idealab to best consider and test the validity of various products and ideas.

A number of companies born from Idealab were started way too soon, says Founder and CEO Bill Gross. However, a number of these firms went on to success, as Idealab fostered their development until the market was ready. In this clip, Gross explains why solid cash management is often the key tool in surviving until customer demand, or acquisition interest, adequately develops.

Before Bill Gross founded Idealab, he started Knowledge Adventure, an early educational software company. In this clip, Gross shares how Knowledge Adventure discovered its major pivot through direct interaction with customers. In an effort initially meant to reach sales targets, employees served as a "weekend warriors" demonstrating products in retail outlets. This effort revealed the need to target their software products to specific ages, a key insight to the company's future success.

Idealab Founder and CEO Bill Gross offers lessons he has learned from company failures. According to Gross, company failures are often due to two common factors: team issues and running out of funding. He also shares his reasoning on why the most successful entrepreneurs are those with the best execution and the most persistence.

Idealab Founder Bill Gross lays out a clear and thoughtful explanation for solar energy being the best possible source for the planet's growing energy demands. He illuminates the reality of current energy usage, the socio-economic factors that will impact future needs, and the limitations of other non-fossil fuel energy options. Gross is chairman of eSolar, an Idealab spin-off that focuses on making solar energy cost-competitive in the global marketplace.

Idealab Founder and CEO Bill Gross addresses a question regarding his company's willingness to hear ideas from outside the company and the competitive advantage that this may or may not provide. Gross says Idealab now spends more time hearing ideas from external sources than they did in the past. He also articulates Idealab's principle of trying to judge ideas more on their possible impact on society than on a projected return on investment.

Bill Gross, chairman of eSolar and founder of Idealab, discusses how Moore's Law provides a new weapon in the fight to make solar energy technologies more productive and cost-competitive. After examining current solar energy harnessing techniques, Gross focused his attention on applying Moore's Law to high-efficiency solar conversion systems. eSolar was founded to work on the development of these ideas. In this clip, Gross describes the technology behind eSolar's current solutions.

Idealab Founder and CEO Bill Gross offers an engaging way of examining the mix of personalities present on management teams, featuring the roles of the Entrepreneur (E), Producer (P), Administrator (A), and Integrator (I). According to Gross, each of us has a dominant type, and individuals of different types often will not see eye to eye. However, the best management teams consist of a strong mix of all four types, working together.