This tech entrepreneur’s 5-year-old son helped him find his calling

This article is part of Tech in Asia’s partnership with The Jay Kim Show where we publish the revised transcripts from the show’s podcast interviews with top entrepreneurs. This is heavily revised from the original show transcripts. For the full interview, go here.

Kent Langley is a Silicon Valley-based entrepreneur who has had multiple exits and now runs a company called ProductionScale, which focuses on the global exponential organization movement (global EXO movement). What exactly is this? It is basically his method to teach large organizations how to create a structure to leverage exponential technologies (think Elon Musk-type projects, including robotics, drones, artificial intelligence, 3D printing, and nanotechnology).

A photo of Langley.

Langley is also a graduate and professor at Singularity University (SU), where he teaches about data science and exponential organizations. SU is essentially a school for the smartest people in the world that solve global problems.

How did you get to where you are today?

“I’ve been on the West coast here in California […] since 2002, and I’ve started four companies […]. I’ve had one successful exit, one kind of right down the middle, and another couple. One was an interesting experiment and one was—we’ll just call that that big failure everyone needs to really galvanize. That’s my entrepreneurial career here on the west coast, but I’ve literally been starting companies since I was a little kid.

“More than anything, […] something happened to me in my last company. I developed something that’s called a ‘massive transformative purpose’ for myself. That was to apply technology for humanity. Since the moment I figured that out about myself, everything changed.”

How did that pivotal moment happen for you?

“It was actually a moment of failure and embarrassment. I was running a company, my last entrepreneurial effort, and it just literally wasn’t working. We weren’t getting that coveted product/market fit.

“We started seeking ways to pivot. In our particular case, honestly, it was a bit too late. I wish I had recognized that better at the time. That was the failing part, so that organization just wasn’t functioning, wasn’t working the way I wanted.

“The embarrassment part was—I have a seven-year-old son and this was when he was probably five and he looked at me and said, ‘Daddy, what do you do?’ Every kid asks their dad this, and I looked at him and I said, ‘Well, I build these technologies that do x, y, z,’ and then it hit me right in that moment that when I was going to say, ‘that do this,’ and why my technology was being applied, I didn’t like it. I did not like the way the technology I’m capable of doing and [the technology] my teams were building was being applied.

“I went big and I said, ‘Well, I’m going to find a better reason to do this sort of thing.’ That’s what I’ve been doing ever since.”

What are some of the projects that you’re working on?

“Two of my key projects are to work with two of the leading organizations in the implementation of the underlying EXO methodology.

“That methodology was discussed first in the book Exponential Organizations by Salim Ismail, [where] one of my companies, the failure, was profiled […]. I was an advisor on the creation of the book early on.

“One of the companies [I worked on was] called EXO Works. That company is all about transforming organizations into EXOs and really standing for the global transformation of business.

“The second big project is something called the Fast Track Institute. This is a global non-profit that is doing exactly what EXO Works does for organizations […]. We’re doing it for cities. In that context, we’re trying to connect citizens to their citizens and we’re trying to pump massive amounts of exponential technology knowledge into each region in which we run our framework of the EXO methodology, which is called a Fast Track.”

What is Singularity University and how did you get started?

What are your immediate goals that you want to do in 2017?

With all the work that you’ve done, how do you want to be remembered?