Pulling the future towards you with Gus Balbontin

Join us to celebrate our 300th episode!

For anyone lucky enough to attend LambEx this year, Gus Balbontin was one of our favourite speakers. So, when he agreed to come on for our special 300th episode, we were beyond excited.

The messages Gus shared during his talk have stuck with many. He challenged (and succeeded) in getting us to think differently and to question any long-standing assumptions we'd had.

Gus grew up in sheep country in Patagonia before leaving Argentina at the age of 17 because of "a healthy disregard for the status quo". By 22, he'd dropped out of university, hitchhiked across South America, started his first business and landed his dream job at Lonely Planet, giving him a front-row seat to the disruption that came alongside the internet and ensuing technology boom.

These days, Gus is an investor, founder, advisor, and speaker, working across startups, AI, robotics, 3D-printed wheelchairs, and climate technology. Gus doesn’t claim to know exactly what the future will look like. Instead, he argues that we should be getting better at adapting to whatever comes next.

He talks about why successful businesses and farms can become comfortable with systems that have worked for years, which is why disruption often looks ridiculous before it becomes obvious.

His advice is to stop waiting for the future to become clear and start playing with it now. Try something unfamiliar. Follow a new idea down a rabbit hole. Make a small experiment. See what happens.

We couldn't have asked for a better guest for our 300th episode. We hope this gives you a chance to think about staying relevant, challenging assumptions and being willing to rethink things that have worked well for a long time.

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