From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
As a leader, you must evolve with the role. When I was 22, 23, 24, I was learning what it meant to be an entrepreneur and a CEO, it felt like I was spinning out of control. My identity, and that of the company, were one-and-the=same, and that's not just inaccurate, it's unhealthy. Once I was able to separate my identity from the business, it got me really focussed on how I could become a better leader.
One of the defining experiences I had with CNET, a digital media company where I was the fourth employee back in the dawn of the internet, was recognizing the power of asking for help.
Entrepreneurship is a way of life. For me, entrepreneurship has always been about being a builder. Whether it's about undiscovered artists or working with companies pre-launch, the build process is what attracts me.
My fun statement is that if I see the same thing, three times in one week, from disparate news or information sources, I have to move quickly as it's a trend that's likely to happen.
All the talks I give are about failure, how hard it is, how much this job kinda' sucks and genuinely how tough it is. People often go into this world thinking it's all roses, and it's not.
The people who were there at the beginning may not be the people who are scalable... As a founder, one of the hardest things you ever may need to do is take someone into your office who was there from the beginning... but who you now recognise doesn't have the skills for the next chapter of the business' journey.
So many people say, 'Jacqueline, I would love to change the world- but I don't know my purpose yet…' Purpose doesn't come to people sitting at the starting blocks and thinking about purpose. You have to live it.
I even had my wife convince my in-laws to mortgage their property, for Christ's sake, so I could produce these cartridges. I knew I had something special. Game Boy was coming out at that time, and I thought Tetris was the perfect game for it.
Undeniably, joining a flourishing company vastly differs from joining a struggling one, just as there's a significant contrast between building a company with the intention to sell and constructing one with the goal of passing it on.
In the same way that business entrepreneurship has transformed industry since the early 1970's, social entrepreneurship can transform the social sector by having people who are willing to take risks and innovate to help address social issues.
When you're starting out, your ambition shouldn't be defined by someone else's success criteria. That's something I struggled with, and still do.
Israel is not called 'the start-up nation' for nothing. We have great statistics to show the number of start-ups per capita, the number of PhD's per capita, V/C Dollars per capita, Patents per capita and more. Israel creates a huge amount of innovative start-ups which are often bought out before they are even revenue producing!