Inspiring Great Ideas

Given that so much diversity, not just in racial diversity, ethnic diversity, but diversity of thought in your background, you’re born in Taipei, lived in Brazil, went to a German school, lived in Texas, now you live in California. How does that affect how you think about diversity as a leader, and how do you infuse that within your company?

There are a lot of different ways, but I’ll pick one that’s really important to me, right? And as a startup, I would say we’re about ideas, that’s our lifeblood, right? We’re about ideas, and can we generate ideas? But if you think about how ideas get generated, they don’t come out in one way. If you think about how people express them, how people arrive at them, how people cultivate them, they’re different. And you think about the Asian culture, for example, right? They’re usually not blurting these ideas out, right? So, I remember for myself, it wasn’t like, “Oh, let me just throw out half-baked idea.” And since then, I’ve been quite prolific at throwing out half-baked ideas. No, but…

You’ve been diversified.

I’ve been diversified and retaught. But I think appreciating the fact that great ideas don’t always come out in the same way, but sometimes you’ll have to create an environment where you have to wait a little bit, and let the ideas come out. Because sometimes people think of ideas in different ways, and you have to let it marinate a little differently. And a lot of times, it’s really just how people express them. It’s not because the idea is there, so sometimes it’s that half beat away, right? Let’s just wait a half beat before we move off the topic, of move off. Because different people, different environments think differently.
And so, I think the awareness of the group, not just of us individuals as managers, but of an organization to appreciate that, hey, those ideas come out in different ways, in different communication styles, in different environments. I think it’s a really important aspect of what we try to do at SambaNova because we do need everybody in the company to invent, everybody to innovate, everybody to think differently. And out of that is where you get the collection of ideas that makes a company successful.