Introduction

Stephen Wolfram answers questions from his viewers about business and innovation as part of an unscripted livestream series, also available on YouTube here: https://wolfr.am/youtube-sw-business-qa

Questions include: Can you give us some insights into how you scaled up Wolfram, and what important issues / questions you had to tackle or what significant lessons you learned? - Are there cultural biases that you have had to overcome for breaking any prior limits in the possibilities of your activities? - How did you find your first employees? Did you have to go to a lot of places to find them? - Partner vs employee is a really interesting distinction to discuss - employees complete tasks, partners identify tasks worth investing in? - How do you deal with individuals who are strongly convicted that they are knowledgeable on a matter but actually have no idea what they are talking about? - Jim Cramer talked on Lex about political games Steve Jobs and his people played, a kind of high level thing. What does that really mean? - In the beginning, how many of your decisions about the company were gut instinct/market research/customer feedback/something else? - ​Is it possible to earn money doing free software? What is "Open Source" good for from your perspective? - How do you assess people to figure out their niche?