Future belongs to those who dream
Introduction
Lately, I find myself spending more and more time contemplating the future and attempting to predict it. As a CEO, this is an integral part of the role—anticipating what’s ahead and aligning strategy and tactics to meet it. Think about it: every early-stage start-up needs a range of plans—business, marketing, sales, software development, and more. But what is a plan, really? It’s an educated guess, an attempt to foresee the future based on the limited information we currently have.
My role requires me to craft these plans, along with backup plans for the original ones, and backups to the backups—it’s a continuous cycle. This process is much like a complex game of chess, except we’re playing with only partial knowledge of the board. It’s both exhilarating and exhausting, but it often leads me to a deeper question: What kind of world are we building for the next generation?
Children are the most important work
Being a parent is a unique and challenging journey. Despite my extensive experience as a coach, nothing could fully prepare me for the responsibility of nurturing, caring for, and educating a child from birth. Guiding someone's growth and development is an immense responsibility, one that profoundly shapes their future. It's undeniable that parental mistakes often contribute to the limitations adults face later in life. The balance required is delicate, and in my view, no one—whether a parent, educator, or institutional caregiver—is immune to making errors.
However, having to raise children, entrusting such a responsibility to someone else doesn’t align with my nature. To address this challenge, I decided to approach parenting with the same principles I apply in business. I invested time and effort into creating a structured program specifically designed to educate my children effectively.
The best way to predict the future is to create it
How can we design an education program for a future we can’t predict? The uncertainty of what society will become is precisely why I founded our business incubator. Predicting the future is incredibly challenging, but testing ideas and hypotheses in real-world scenarios allows people to adapt quickly, rather than waiting and hoping for the best. Over the past few years, we’ve witnessed remarkable advancements in general-purpose AI, which are already reshaping our world. Soon, we’ll likely see an entirely new economic ecosystem driven by technological automation.
Now, imagine what the world might look like in a few decades when today’s children enter the business arena. The skills we teach them now may no longer be relevant. Instead, we must focus on instilling enduring values: honesty, hard work, discipline, loyalty, morality, vitality, and flexibility. Beyond that, we should equip them with timeless abilities such as strategic thinking, resource management, communication, partnership, foresight, intuition, patience, and empathy. These skills and values are the foundation of success—past, present, and future.
Believe you can, and you're halfway there
Sounds idyllic, doesn’t it? Yet, I believe these values are essential if we hope to survive as a species. A society built on such principles would undoubtedly be a far better place to live. At our business incubator, our mission is to contribute to this vision by fostering an ecosystem grounded in these values. This aligns with the timeless engineering wisdom: “Always leave the playground in better shape than you found it.”
We hold a firm belief that humanity is meant for greater achievements—expanding across the solar system and perhaps the universe—not wasting its potential in conflicts over resources or acts of betrayal. We aspire to see our generation and those that follow focus their intellect and creativity on solving grand challenges, rather than fixating on the grim prospect of nuclear war and mutual destruction.
Conclusion
The future is inherently unpredictable, and our children will grow up in a world vastly different from the one we know today. Core industries like energy, communication, automation, technology, and space exploration will likely remain central to progress. Regardless of what changes lie ahead, creating a society rooted in essential values and fostering collaboration is crucial to shaping a better future for the next generation.
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