Business, Innovation and Managing Life (September 15, 2021)

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

Questions include: ​How to start a mega corporation? - How do you retain the best people over the years? - ​I heard, CEOs have actually no impact in large companies. - How do you have a successful software company in this day with only 3 good ML engineers left? Just saying I've heard WRI really needs to hire more ML experts, how do you do that when good ML people don't work for less than 150k - How many people could someone lead? - After starting a business, how do you know when you should secure an attorney? It's such a large expense but seems like an unavoidable necessity. - ​Any plans to take a trip into space? - How much more should the CEO make then the median salary? - I am 17 right now. Do you think the USA is better than the UK for business and innovation? 2nd question: do you think its a good idea to start building companies in your 20s, or is it a better idea to first build (theoretical) experience and go for it later on? as in, what do you think of people in their early 20s building ML/AI startups? - Do you have any heuristics on deciding when to stop or dramatically alter a long term and expensive research project? - It is tempting to be very quantitative about measuring the output of your various projects and teams in Wolfram. tempting to try and optimize it can also leave people feeling like robots? Balance? - Have you ever made any of your employees sign employee contracts with non-compete agreements? - Are there any focused Research teams in Wolfram? Like full-time researchers on AI/ML? - ​Are there any plans to open offices in Germany? - You were very successful at a young age. How can one be confident towards older or more experienced people? - What quality should we look in people to determine if working with them will improve us? - ​Do you have ideas for intermediate-scale projects / companies (maybe 25 or less people) that you aren't working on because they aren't compatible with Wolfram's size? - ​Dear Stephen, what is your favorite chocolate? - What was your reaction to getting the MacArthur grant? Was it exciting? What did you do with the money? (Was there money attached to it back then?)