David Bland, lead author of Testing Business Ideas, shares how assumptions mapping helped DuPont and Qnity build an award-winning experimentation culture. Across 35 real opportunities, DuPont saved over $12M by stopping weak projects early and earned about $24M from the ideas that passed.
“They don’t quit their job cold turkey. That’s not what I’ve observed firsthand.”
Only twelve companies have ever been worth more than a trillion dollars. Ten of them are American. Eight of those ten were started fractionally, by people who were still in a job or still in school when they built the first version.
Shuo Chen is a General Partner at IOVC in the Bay Area, where she has made over 150 early-stage investments across a decade, with around a dozen exits through IPO and acquisition by Fortune 50 companies. She was one of the earliest investors in Instacart and has sold companies to Goldman Sachs, Ford and Caterpillar. She also teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford and UC Berkeley, and writes the Monthly Note. She joins Aidan McCullen to explain fractional founders, the people who de-risk an idea before they ever hand in their notice.
In this conversation, Shuo reveals:
– Why 8 of the 10 American trillion-dollar companies were built fractionally, and 1 in 4 of the Fortune 500 too
– The Salesforce story most people get wrong: Larry Ellison wrote Marc Benioff a cheque to go and compete
– How Jensen Huang and his co-founders designed NVIDIA after work, while still employed in semiconductors
– Why “the organism rejects the organ” explains almost every intrapreneur who ends up leaving
– What frontier firms actually are, and why giving staff access to AI tools now counts for nothing
– Why revenue per employee has become the number startups check before every single hire
– The human-to-agent leverage ratio, and why this is the last generation of leaders who manage only people
– How Spirit Airlines’ bankruptcy revealed that decades of internal data was its most valuable asset
– Why 95% of the world’s data sits inside private enterprise databases, and why that is gold to AI labs
Chapters:
00:00 Fractional Founder Myth
03:04 Meet Shuo Chen
05:12 Why Founders Side Hustle
08:28 Proof From Trillion Firms
10:15 Keeping Intrapreneurs Close
13:15 Frontier Firms Defined
15:53 Revenue Per Employee Era
22:22 Advice For Students
28:58 AI Writing And Learning
34:58 Spirit Airlines Data Gold
41:20 Tool Spotlight Woolf
47:12 Wrap Up And Links
About Shuo Chen: Shuo Chen is a General Partner at IOVC, an early-stage venture firm investing in the future of work, and teaches entrepreneurship at Stanford and UC Berkeley. Read her Monthly Note at https://shuo.iovc.io and connect on LinkedIn at https://www.linkedin.com/in/shuo-c
About the Host: Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Learn more at https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen
About The Innovation Show: the Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Hosted by Aidan McCullen, author of Undisruptable, it brings you conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.
This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world’s leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.
Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for the weekly essay behind the show: https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
Website: https://theinnovationshow.io
Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669
Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450
YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen
“When’s the last time you thought about your suppliers as your partner in innovation?”
Paul Nunes, co-author of Jumping the S-Curve, Big Bang Disruption and Pivot to the Future, returns to talk to Aidan McCullen about the companies that come back from the dead. Motorola is the case study, combinatorial innovation is the engine, and the uncomfortable question underneath it all is what your company would actually be worth in pieces.
In this conversation, Paul reveals:
→ What a Lazarus taxon is, and why a handful of companies reappear decades after everyone wrote them off
→ How Motorola collapsed, sold to Google largely for its patents, and found a second life under Lenovo
→ Why a drone is really a phone camera, a gyroscope and some software, and what that means for your R&D budget
→ The $180 to $200 phone strategy that won the markets Apple and Samsung were not designing for
→ Why Kodak kept making billions long after everyone declared it dead
→ The million-dollar Porsche nobody could restore, and why somebody bought it anyway
→ Why Shockley Semiconductor should be a household name, and what the Traitorous Eight really cost it
→ Why putting your name on a stadium or a football shirt may be the first signal of decline
→ The line every chief strategy officer eventually says: it wasn’t that we didn’t know what to do, we no longer had the people to do it
→ Why the man who built the Learjet also built the car radio that became Motorola
→ Why price deflation, not competition, may be the fundamental strategy problem of the next decade
00:00 Innovation And Downfall
01:13 Sponsor And Guest Intro
02:18 Lazarus Companies Explained
05:54 Motorola Rebirth Story
07:30 Combinatorial Innovation Basics
14:41 Modularity And Supplier Innovation
19:18 Partners Turn Competitors
24:33 Motorola And Nonconsumers
27:56 IP And Hidden Value
34:57 Vanity Marketing Signals
39:32 Talent Curves And Seed Corn
44:44 Deflation And Strategy Pressure
48:01 Closing Thoughts And Wrap
About Paul Nunes
Paul F. Nunes is co-author of Jumping the S-Curve, Big Bang Disruption, Pivot to the Future and Mass Affluence, and spent years as Global Managing Director of Research at the Accenture Institute for High Performance. His research on growth, disruption and reinvention has been covered by the New York Times, the Wall Street Journal and Forbes.
Find Paul Nunes on LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paul-nunes-5351773/
About the Host
Aidan McCullen is the 2025 Thinkers50 Innovation Award recipient, keynote speaker on AI, disruption, innovation and change, host of The Innovation Show, and author of Undisruptable: A Mindset of Permanent Reinvention (Wiley). Learn more about Aidan at https://theinnovationshow.io/about-aidan-mccullen
This series is brought to you by Kyndryl, who run and reimagine the technology systems that drive advantage for the world’s leading businesses. With a unique blend of AI-powered consulting built on unmatched managed-service capability, Kyndryl helps leaders harness technology for smarter decisions, faster innovation, and lasting competitive edge. Learn more about Kyndryl and the Kyndryl Institute at https://www.kyndryl.com.
Subscribe to the Thursday Thought on Substack for a chance to win a copy of one of Paul’s books, with thanks to Kyndryl.
About The Innovation Show
The Thinkers50-recognised podcast where square pegs find their place in a world of round holes. Hosted by Aidan McCullen, author of Undisruptable, it brings you conversations with world-class authors, scientists and practitioners on disruption, innovation, change, transformation and leadership.
Connect:
🌐 https://theinnovationshow.io
📨 Substack (Thursday Thought): https://thethursdaythought.substack.com
🎧 Apple Podcasts: https://podcasts.apple.com/ie/podcast/the-innovation-show/id1148455669
🎧 Spotify: https://open.spotify.com/show/63nFKf4bsSWo3W72gWtOsK?si=b62d9614237c4450
▶️ YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/c/theinnovationshow
🔗 LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aidanmccullen
#Innovation #PaulNunes #CombinatorialInnovation #JumpingTheSCurve #Motorola #Disruption #Leadership #Strategy #Modularity #Podcast #AidanMcCullen #TheInnovationShow #Thinkers50 #Reinvention
Combinatorial innovation means most new products are recombinations of parts that already exist. Paul Nunes, co-author of Jumping the S-Curve, explains how that logic explains Motorola’s collapse and comeback, why suppliers matter more than your R&D department, and why price deflation may be the hardest strategy problem of the next decade.
Identity addiction is why most behavioural change fails, says Dov Baron, author of The Art of Belonging. In Vancouver, he tells Aidan McCullen about the 1990 climbing fall in which he died five times, the moment a dead cat forced him to choose a new life, and why organisations that want innovation must build community, psychological safety and healthy conflict.
The core business kills everything that looks different. In Part 3 of the Strategyzer series, Alex Osterwalder shows how a business model portfolio and the right governance let leaders explore and exploit at the same time — from SonoSite’s incentives trap to Logitech’s trees, plants and seeds.
Generative AI can formulate a brilliant value proposition — but only if you’ve done the homework it cannot do for you. Alexander Osterwalder returns for Part 2 of our Strategyzer series to share the four evidence-based foundations of value proposition design, the new Value Stack tool, and why growth is a profession, not a creative gift.
Business cases are a fantasy, says Alex Osterwalder. What you can measure is the evidence they could work. The Strategyzer CEO and Business Model Canvas creator shares his evidence-based innovation playbook: five levels of evidence, scored across desirability, feasibility and viability, that show leaders which projects to fund and which to retire. Part one of a three-part series.
The project driven organization is Antonio Nieto-Rodriguez’s answer to a world where agile is no longer enough. The creator of the project economy joins Aidan McCullen to explore why EY’s Project Everest and Nike’s digital transformation stumbled, why leaders must launch less and finish more, and how “are you crazy?” projects create the future.
Rita McGrath and Sangeet Paul Choudary join Aidan McCullen to explain structural uncertainty — the moment the game itself, not just the play, becomes the thing in question. They cover transient advantage, network effects, rule makers versus rule takers, and how to use AI without outsourcing your thinking.