John and Micheál are the founders of Cropsafe- an AI and satellite-based farming solution. I was really excited to speak with them as they're two of the sharpest young minds I've ever encountered and typify what I see as the next generation of young founders- educated, networked, and even funded over the internet thanks to initiatives like Pioneer.

In our wide-ranging conversation, we explore the Cropsafe story, the balance of innovation and globalisation, and how to maximise serendipity in your life- among other things. I was really inspired by this conversation and I hope you will be too.

A few highlights:

Micheál and John’s Advice for Ambitious Young People 🚀

In short:

* Maximise the serendipity in your life by being active on Twitter, attending events and connecting with interesting people.

* The answer to most of your problems is only a Google Search or cold email away.

* Allow yourself to think big.

“the point where you say that there's no way I'm going to be the next Amazon or Facebook or Google is the point where that journey stops. So I think it's okay to be ambitious.”

On Reading 📚

In an interview with Tim Ferriss, Patrick Collison coined the term ‘person-book-fit’. That is to say, often a book resonates with a certain person at a particular time in their life as its precisely what they need at that time. Micheál strikes a similar keynote when reflecting on the role of books in his life.

“The thing with books is there there's always something to like take out of them. So it's just depends on what you’re going through, how you immerse yourself in the book and what you're thinking about (at the time).”

Both Micheál and John love to read and expound on the value of reading in the clip below.

What John Learned From Attending The Famously Grueling 42 Coding Bootcamp in Silicon Valley 🏔

42 is a free, teacherless coding bootcamp founded by eccentric French billionaire Xavier Niel. The program compresses into a month what many engineers learn over a number of years. As you might expect, it’s an intense few weeks. Niel elucidates:

“Then, we try out their motivation through La Piscine. This entails working at the school for 450 hours in a month, 15 hours a day, every day for 30 days. That’s how we test their motivation. What we have seen in France — I don’t know if it’s the same in the United States — is that soon, some of them say: “That’s really nice and all, but it’s not for me. It’s too much work, it’s too hard. I’d rather leave and do something else.”

Why put yourself through this? Well, like Frank Sinatra sang in the seventies, ‘if you can make it there, you’ll make it anywhere.’ Make it through the grueling 42 Piscine, and you’ll be well-equipped to handle the travails of building and scaling a startup.

John is one of the school’s many success stories. While he reflects on his time there as the most challenging month of his life, the lessons he learned in grit, self-reliance and ‘figuring things out for himself’ made it all worthwhile.

“The main thing… wasn’t the programming language. It wasn't really the main point. It was more that I learned how to figure out things for myself, because since there was no teachers, you had to figure out, okay, how am I going to write this piece of code?

So really just boils down to asking your peers or figuring it out on Google because you've pretty much the entire history of the world's knowledge within one click away. You just go into Google and you figure it out for yourself.”

I hope you enjoy and get as much inspiration from this conversation as I did.

Have a great week!

Will

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