Entrepreneurship

We are more than we appear to be. The technology cannot be uninvented — I know, until I die, that we did that, and I was a key enabler of it.

There is no mundane. The word itself, I think, is a non-word. It should not be a word.

The small act of paying attention to people is extraordinarily rewarding to every member of the team — and it’s amplified in an inverse way from their level on the hierarchy.

The line between acceptable mitigated risk and recklessness is actually very thin— and it’s even more dangerous because it moves.

Life is a series of decisions you make with imperfect information — and then carrying it through with conviction, while at the same time looking over your shoulder to make sure the rest of the team is coming along with you

The more golden the goose, the greater the temptation to butcher it. Success makes you a target. It makes you something worth capturing

Essentially, corruption entails a misallocation of entrepreneurial talent into activities that carries individual benefit, but has destructive or unproductive consequences for society at large. Because of its essentially predatory nature, it reduces productive investment, leads to an outflow of talent, lowering growth rates and increasing income inequalities.

If you look for the next Steve Jobs or Richard Branson in developing economies, however, their businesses rarely make it out of the garage as they are missing three critical factors. They lack financial capital, qualified employees plus the knowledge and access to financial markets- those three things stop those businesses enjoying the kinds of prosperity we do in the northern hemisphere.

Unknown.

I've worked with many entrepreneurs and billionaires and I see the same trend over and over again. What they want is someone to manage the liquid side of their portfolio, and they want to take a huge chunk out and use it as their risk capital on things they know and can control. The money didn't just drop-in… it arrived through creation and building! These individuals are always going to be about growth….

We have to be careful about just increasing start-up activity. If we are increasing the level of start-up activity of people who are more inclined to employ other people, fine… but I'm not convinced that is the case.

For me, one of the big gaps is youth entrepreneurship. There are a high number of young people who want to set-up businesses, but there is a huge gap between their aspirations/intentions and the actual delivery of setting up a business.

If you are a VC or into angel investing, you can come here and literally just set up a stand in a coffee shop with a sign saying 'looking for start-ups' and you would have a string of people coming in all day long... you could literally sit in that coffee shop from now until next year and you wouldn't get close to touching the sides.

Mathematician & Topologist, Solved the 4-Dimensional Poincaré Conjecture

People have always been entrepreneurs, what's changed is connectivity. We can now relate to people all over the world and get to market really quickly. You could generate traffic in 24 hours, and sell within a week. It's incredible.

Author of "The $100 Startup" and lifestyle design expert

The most common is deferring action and getting stuck in paralysis... The second most common is finance... Investing too much in unproven concepts for example. People can, and should, start their businesses as micro-enterprises to test their concepts and reduce risks.

Author of "The $100 Startup" and lifestyle design expert

One of the things I'm interested in encouraging people to think about is the whole area of risk. What really is risky?! In many ways I think it's actually much safer to take things into your own hands rather than trusting your destiny to an uncertain jobs market.

Author of "The $100 Startup" and lifestyle design expert

I think it's about usefulness! People talk of 'following your passion' but there are plenty of things people are passionate about that nobody will pay them money for, so you can't just tell someone to just follow their passion. The missing piece? usefulness... We say the magic formula is: Passion + Usefulness = Success.

Author of "The $100 Startup" and lifestyle design expert