Hermann Hesse

This Nobel Prize winner shows startups show the bravery to embrace big questions can change the world.

Hermann Hesse (1877–1962), Swiss poet and novelist, was never one to deal with the concrete, but rather the abstract and spiritual. His ideas reverberated within the shifting culture of the 1960s.

Hesse's last full-length novel, "The Glass Bead Game," is daringly set centuries in the future. It's an abstract coming-of-age novel that glorifies a deep and interdisciplinary knowledge of all arts and sciences. Hesse's book, completed during World War II, was rejected for publication by his native country, Germany, due to its anti-fascist views.

However, a few years later Hesse's book won the Nobel Prize in Literature, affirming its literary value and humanitarian ideas.

From Hesse, all startups can learn not to shy away from big questions, but rather to forge fearlessly forward in search of the truth.