WEBVTT

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Today actually is
a very special day for me,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because it is my birthday.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Applause)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And so thanks for all of you
for joining the party.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Laughter)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
But every time you throw a party,
there's someone there to spoil it. Right?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Laughter)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And I'm a physicist,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and this time I brought
another physicist along to do so.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
His name is Albert Einstein, also Albert,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and he's the one who said that the person

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
who has not made his main contributions
to science by the age of 30

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
will never do so.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Now you don't need to check Wikipedia

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that I'm being 30.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Laughter)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So effectively what
he is telling me, and us,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
is that when it comes to my science,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I'm a dead wood.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Well, luckily, I had my share
of luck within my career.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Around age 28, I became
very interested in networks,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and a few years later we managed
to kind of publish a few key papers

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that reported the discovery
of scale-free networks

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and really gave birth to a new discipline
that we call network science today.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And if you really care about it,
you can get a PhD now in network science

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
in Budapest, in Boston,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and you can study it all over the world.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
A few years later,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
when I moved to Harvard
first as a sabbatical,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I became interested
in another type of networks,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and that time the networks
within ourselves,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
how the genes and the proteins
and the metabolites link to each other,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and how they connect to disease.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And that also, that interest led
to a major explosion within medicine,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
including the Network Medicine
Division at Harvard

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that has more than 300 researchers
who are using this perspective

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to treat patients and develop new cures.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And a few years ago, I thought that I
would take this idea of networks

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and expertise we had in networks
in a different area,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that is to understand success.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And why did we do that?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Well, we thought that to some degree,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
our success is determined
by the networks we are part of,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that our networks can push us forward,
they can pull us back,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and I was curious if we could use
the knowledge in big data and expertise

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that we develop on networks to really
quantify how these things happen.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
This is a result from that.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
What you see here is a network
of galleries in museums

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that connect to each other,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and through this map
that we mapped out last year,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
we are able to predict very accurately

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
the success of an artist

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
if you give me the first five exhibits
that he or she had in her career.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Well, as we thought about success,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
we realized that success
is not only about networks.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
There are so many
other dimensions to that.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And, you know, one of the things
we need for success obviously

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
is performance.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So let's define what's the difference
between performance and success.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Well, performance is what you do,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
how fast you run,
what kind of paintings you paint,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
what kind of papers you publish.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
However, in our working definition,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
success is about what does the community
notices from what you did,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
from your performance,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
how does it acknowledge it,
and how does it reward you for it?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
In other terms,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
your performance is about you,
but your success is about all of us.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And this was a very
important shift for us,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because in the moment we defined success
as being a collective measure

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that the community provides to us,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it became measurable,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because if it's in the community,
there are multiple data points about that.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So now we believe,
and we go to school, we exercise,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
we practice because we believe
that performance leads to success.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
But the way we actually
started to explore,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
we realized that performance and success
are very, very different animals

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
when it comes to
the mathematics of the problem.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And let me illustrate that.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So what you see here is
the fastest man on Earth, Usain Bolt.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And of course, he wins most of
the competitions that he enters.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And we know he's the fastest on Earth
because we have a chronometer

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to measure his speed.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Well, what is interesting about him
is that when he wins,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
he doesn't do so by really significantly
outrunning his competition.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
He's running at most a percent faster
than the one who loses the race.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And not only does he run only
one percent faster than the second one,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but he doesn't run
10 times faster than I do,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and I'm not a good runner,
trust me on that.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Laughter)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And every time we are able
to measure performance,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
we notice something very interesting.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
That is, performance is bounded.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
What it means is that there are
no huge variations in human performance.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It varies only in a narrow range,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and we do need the chronometer
to measure the differences.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
This is not to say that we cannot
see the good from the best ones,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but the best ones
are very hard to distinguish,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and the problem with that
is that most of us work in areas

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
where we do not have a chronometer
to gauge our performance.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Alright, performance is bounded,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
there are no huge differences between us
when it comes to our performance.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
How about success?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Well, let's switch to
a different topic like books, right?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
One measure of success for writers
is how many people read your work?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And so when my previous book
came out in 2009,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I was in Europe talking with my editor,
and I was interested,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
who is the competition?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And I had some fabulous one.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
That week (Laughter)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Dan Brown came out with "The Lost Symbol"

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and "The Last Song" also came out,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Nicholas Sparks.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And when you just look at the list,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
you realize, you know, performance-wise

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
there is hardly any difference
between these books or mine.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Right?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So maybe if Nicholas Sparks' team
works a little harder,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
he could easily be number one,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because it's almost by accident
who ended up at the top.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So I said, let's look at the numbers.
I am a data person, right?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So let's see what were
the sales for Nicholas Sparks.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And it turns out that
that opening weekend,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Nicholas Sparks sold more than
a hundred thousand copies,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
which is an amazing number.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
You can actually get to the top
of the New York Times Bestseller List

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
by selling 10,000 copies a week,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
so he tenfold overcame
what he needed to be number one.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Yet he wasn't number one. Why?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Because there was Dan Brown,
who sold 1.2 million copies that week.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Laughter)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And the reason I like this number
is because it shows that really,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
when it comes to success, it's unbounded,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that the best doesn't only get
slightly more than the second best,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but gets orders of magnitude more,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because success is a collective measure.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
We give it to them, rather than
we earn it through our performance.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So one of things we realized
is that performance,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
what we do is bounded but success,
which is collective, is unbounded,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
which makes you wonder,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
how do you get these
huge differences in success

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
when you have so tiny
differences in performance?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And recently I published a book
that I devoted to that very question,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and they didn't give enough time
to go over all of that,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
so I'm going to go back
to the question of alright,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
you have success, when should that appear?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So let's go back to the party spoiler,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and ask ourselves,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
why did Einstein make
this ridiculous statement

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that only before 30
you could actually be creative?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Well, because he looked around himself
and he saw all these fabulous physicists

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that created quantum mechanics
and modern physics,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and they were all in their 20s
and early 30s when they did so.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And it's not only him.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It's not only observational bias,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because there's actually
a whole field of genius research

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that has documented the fact
that if we look at the people

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
we admire from the past

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and then we look at what age
did they make their biggest contribution,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
whether that's music,
whether that's science,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
whether that's engineering,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
most of them tend to do so
in their 20s, 30s, early 40s at most.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
But there's a problem
with this genius research.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Well, first of all, it created
the impression to us

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that creativity equals youth,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
which is painful, right?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Laughter)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And it also has an observational bias,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because it only looks at geniuses

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and doesn't look at ordinary scientists,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and doesn't look at all of us and asking,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
is it really true that creativity
vanishes as we age?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So that's exactly what we tried to do,
and this is important for that

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to actually have references.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So let's look at an ordinary
scientist like myself,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and let's look at my career.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So what you see here is all the papers
that I published from my first paper,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it's in 1989 that I was still
in Romania when I did so,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
til kind of this year.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And vertically you see
the impact of the paper,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that is, how many citations,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
how many other papers
have been written that cited that work?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And when you look at that,
you see that my career

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
has three roughly different stages.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I had the first 10 years
where I work a lot

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and I don't achieve much.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
No one seems to care
about what I do, right?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
There's hardly any impact.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
That time, I was doing material science,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and then I kind of discovered
for myself networks,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and then started publishing in network,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and that led one high-impact paper
to the other one.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And it really felt good.
That was that stage of my career.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Laughter)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So the question is,
what happens right now?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And we don't know, because there
hasn't been enough time passed yet

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to actually figure out how much impact
those papers will get.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It takes time to acquire.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Well, when you look at the data,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it seems to be that Einstein,
the genius research, is right,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and I'm at that stage of my career.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Laughter)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So we said, OK, let's figure out
how does this really happen

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
first in science, right?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And in order not to have
the selection bias,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
to look only at geniuses,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
we ended up reconstructing the career
of every single scientist

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
from 1900 til today

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and finding for all scientists
what was their personal best,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
whether they got the Nobel Prize
or they never did,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
or no one knows what they did,
even their personal best.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And that's what you see
actually in this slide.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Each line is a career,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and when you have a light blue dot
on the top of that career,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
it says that was their personal best.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And the question is,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
when did they actually make
their biggest discovery?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And to quantify that, we look at
what's the probability

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that you make your biggest discovery
let's say, one, two, three,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
or 10 years into your career?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
We're not looking at real age.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
We're looking at
what we call academic age.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Your academic age starts
when you publish your first papers.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I know some of you are still babies.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Laughter)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So let's look at the probability
that you publish your highest impact paper

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and what you see is indeed
the genius research is right.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Most scientists tend to publish
their highest impact paper

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
in the first 10, 15 years in their career,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and it tanks after that.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It tanks so fast that I'm about,
I'm exactly 30 years into my career,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and the chance that I will publish a paper
that would have higher impact

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
than anything that I did before

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
is less than one percent.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I am in that stage of my career,
according to this data.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
But there's a problem with that.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
We're not doing controls properly.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So the control would be,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
how would a scientist look like
who makes random contribution to science?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Or what is the productivity
of the scientist?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
When do they write papers?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So we measured the productivity,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and amazingly, the productivity,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
your likelihood of writing a paper
in year one, 10, or 20 in your career

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
is indistinguishable from the likelihood
of having the impact

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
in that part of your career.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And to make a long story short,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
after lots of statistical tests,
there's only one explanation for that,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
that really the way we scientists work

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
is that every single paper we write,
every project we do,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
has exactly the same chance
of being our personal best.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
That is, discovery is like a lottery,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and like a lottery ticket,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and then the more lottery tickets we buy,
the higher is the chance,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and it happens to be so
that most scientists

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
buy most of their lottery tickets
in the first 10, 15 years of their career,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and after that,
their productivity decreases.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
They're not buying
any more lottery tickets.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So it looks as if
they would not be creative.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
In reality, they stopped trying.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So when we actually put the data together,
the conclusion is very simple:

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
success can come at any time.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It could be your very first
or very last paper of your career.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It's totally random
in the space of the projects.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
It is the productivity that changes.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And let me illustrate that.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Here is Frank Wilczek,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
who get the Nobel Prize in Physics
for the very first paper

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
he ever wrote in his career
as a graduate student.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
More interesting is John Fenn,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
who at age 70 was forcefully retired
by Yale university.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
They shut his lab down,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and at that moment, he moved
to Virginia Commonwealth University,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
opened another lab,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and it is there at age 72
that he published a paper

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
for which 15 years later he got
the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And you think, OK,
well science is special, right?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
But what about other areas
where we need to be creative?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So let me take another
typical example: entrepreneurship.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Silicon Valley,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
the land of the youth, right?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
And indeed, when you look at it,
you realize that the biggest awards,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
the TechCrunch Awards and other awards,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
are all going to people,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
an average age for them
is late 20s, very early 30s.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
You look at who the VCs give the money to,
some of the biggest VC firms,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
all people in their early 30s.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Which, of course, we know:

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
there is this ethos in Silicon Valley
that youth equals success.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Not when you look at the data,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
because it's not only
about forming a company.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Forming a company is like productivity:
trying, trying, trying.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
When you look at which
of these individuals actually put out

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
a successful company, a successful exit,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and recently some of our colleagues
looked at exactly that question,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and it turns out that yes,
those in the 20s and 30s

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
put out a huge number of companies,
form lots of companies,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
but most of them go bust,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
and when you look at the successful exits,
what you see in this particular plot,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
the older you are, the more likely that
you will actually hit the stock market

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
or the sell the company successfully.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
This is so strong, actually,
that if you are in the 50s,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
you are twice as likely
to actually have a successful exit

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
than if you are in your 30s.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Applause)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
So at the end, what it is
that see, actually?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
What we see is that creativity has no age.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Productivity does, right?

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Which is telling me that
at the end of the day,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
if you keep trying

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Laughter)

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
you could still succeed
and succeed over and over,

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
so my conclusion is very simple.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
I am of this age, back in my lab.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
Thank you.

99:59:59.999 --> 99:59:59.999
(Applause)