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“May you live in interesting times.”

 — Chinese proverb 

This (somewhat liberally translated) Chinese proverb is something you hear often in Silicon Valley these days. Some say it is a curse. Regardless, nobody denies its truth when it comes to the changing technology brings to our world.

Driven by the exponentially accelerating rate of technological progress we now have (literally) supercomputers in our pockets, can access the world’s information at our fingertips, can sequence genes in our kitchen labs, and 3D print prototypes on our desktops. Gordon Moore’s 50-year-old prediction that “the number of transistors in a dense integrated circuit doubles approximately every two years” (know commonly as Moore’s law) holds up to this day and h...

We can quantifiably say that Elon Musk has been the best tech entrepreneur of the modern era. Only one other one — Jim Clark– has built three companies that exited for north of $1 billion, and he needed the dot com bubble to do it. Musk has done it four times, if you count SolarCity, across different industries and in difficult financial times.

And yet, even Musk is still scrapping and fighting for investors’ respect. Witness the current flap about his plan to merge SolarCity with Tesla, which some investors criticize as a scheme for him to bail himself out.

That isn’t how Musk sees it. But he’s used to seeing the world a different way.

Back in 2012, I did an in depth on-stage interview with Musk about the earliest days of his companies,...

Historically, the bulk of the Valley’s successful companies haven’t been the rocketship consumer successes like Google and Facebook. They’ve been the steady doubles, base-hits, triples, and home runs of the companies who sell software to businesses.

And in a time when Google and Facebook alone control some 80% of all digital ad budgets, that business model of selling something is starting to look better and better.

One of the few entrepreneurs to bridge these two worlds– selling intuitive, easy to use products to companies– and build a multi-billion public company out of it was Aaron Levie. Unlike a Marc Benioff, Levie didn’t come from the enterprise world. He never worked a day at Oracle or IBM. He came up with the idea in college.

It was ...