Daniel Burrus has spent decades talking about the future, but the most useful thing he said on Keep Going had nothing to do with AI or technology. It had to do with regret.

Before he built six companies, before the bestselling books and the keynote stages, he was teaching biology and physics. He had an idea for an airplane design and wanted to turn it into a business. The problem was simple. He had never taken a business class in his life. He was scared of failing.

But he realized something else scared him more. He did not want to become an old man who never tried. The fear of regret outweighed the fear of failure.

That idea sits underneath almost everything he talks about now. Most people think entrepreneurs are fearless. They are not. They are just more afraid of standing still than moving forward.

Burrus also said something I had never heard framed quite this way before. He said entrepreneurs usually have success metrics but almost never have failure metrics.

He gave the example of hiring someone you know is not right for the role. Deep down you know it after a week, but you spend months trying to fix it before finally letting them go. You already saw the failure coming. You just delayed acting on it.

That applies to almost everything. Businesses. Projects. Careers. Relationships. We hold onto broken things because motion feels harder than denial.

A lot of the conversation focused on AI, which Burrus sees less as a replacement for people and more as an amplifier. He argued that companies are making a mistake by focusing only on the tools. First comes mindset, then skillset, then toolset. Most firms skip directly to the software and never rethink how they actually work.

He also pushed back on the panic around AI replacing everyone. His point was simple. Jobs have always changed. The danger is not the technology itself. The danger is pretending your current role will stay frozen forever.

One line stuck with me. “You can only coast downhill.”

That feels true right now. A lot of people are waiting for stability to return before they adapt. But the stable version of the world they remember is probably not coming back. The people who do well over the next decade will likely be the ones willing to relearn things while everyone else argues online about whether change should exist at all.

Burrus is relentlessly optimistic, sometimes almost aggressively so. Normally that kind of thing annoys me. But his optimism is grounded in systems and patterns, not motivational slogans. He studies technology, demographics, and behavior and asks what becomes inevitable once those things start moving together.

His broader point was that most people underestimate the future because they spend too much time staring at the present. Burrus is a unique thinker in that he sees where the puck has gone and where it is going… years and years into the future.

You can check out his books here and hire him at his website.

Paulius Judickas spends a lot of time thinking about something most people never notice, IP addresses. The internet runs on them, every server, every phone, every AI endpoint, every connected device. But there are only so many IPv4 addresses left, and the strange economics around that scarcity have created a new kind of market.

On this episode of Innovators, I spoke with Judickas, VP of Strategic Alliances at IPXO, a company building what is essentially a marketplace for internet infrastructure. IPXO leases IPv4 addresses from companies that have large unused reserves to startups, hosting firms, telecoms, and AI companies that need them to operate. It sounds obscure at first, but the deeper we got into the conversation, the more it started to resemble real estate.

Back in the early days of the internet, engineers assumed 4.3 billion IPv4 addresses would be more than enough. Instead, the modern internet burned through them. Companies that arrived early, IBM, Apple, major telecoms, ended up sitting on massive blocks of addresses, while newer firms often struggle to get even a few hundred.

Judickas explained how IPXO emerged from that imbalance. The founders originally ran a hosting company and began leasing their own unused IP addresses to customers. Demand exploded almost immediately. That experiment eventually became a global marketplace that now manages millions of addresses.

What makes the story interesting is that the business is not really about software alone. It is about trust. Judickas described the challenge of convincing large enterprises that the IP addresses sitting idle on their books could become a revenue stream. In many cases, companies did not even realize those assets had value.

We also talked about the strange half-finished migration from IPv4 to IPv6. For decades, the industry has talked about replacing IPv4 entirely, yet much of the internet still depends on it. Judickas sees a world where both systems coexist for years to come, especially as AI systems and connected devices increase demand for network infrastructure.

The conversation eventually turned toward AI. Every AI endpoint needs connectivity. Every distributed system needs addresses. Judickas believes the next wave of infrastructure demand will come not from traditional hosting companies but from AI firms gathering data, training systems, and deploying agents across the web.

There is something almost invisible about this market. Most people never think about the plumbing underneath the internet until it starts running short. But scarcity changes behavior. IPXO is betting that IP addresses will increasingly behave less like technical resources and more like financial assets, leased, managed, and traded much like commercial property.