Hi there, Shankar here.
We're in the middle of our summer series called U 2.0.
This week's episode comes from our early days of hidden brain.
It looks at who comes up with great ideas and what we can do to have more of them.
Adam Grant was teaching his first class at the Wharton business School when a student came up to him with an interesting proposition.
He says, I've got this big idea.
Three friends and I are going to start an online business, and we're going to disrupt an industry.
Do you want to invest?
But from what Adam could see, this group of friends wasn't doing so well in getting their big idea off the ground.
Six months go by, it's the day before launch.
They still don't have a functioning website.
The whole business is a website.
That's literally all it is.
And so I obviously passed on the investment.
The name of the company, Warby Parker.
They were just named the most innovative company in the world by Fast Company, and they're worth over a billion dollars, which is why my wife handles all our investments now.
I'm Shankar Vedanta, and this week, hidden brain originals.
How to spot one, how to be one.
We bring you my conversation with Adam Grant.
He's a professor at the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania, and he's the author of the new book how non Conformists move the world.