From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
By using the Straight Line System, you can get yourself to a level where you're certainly good enough at sales, where your skill in that area is not going to be what holds you back in life.
I believe that entrepreneurship is something you're born with, or not. I've met many highly intelligent, and incredibly bright people who have not been able to develop their ideas into sensible businesses. Entrepreneurship is not related to intelligence, it's something you have or don't have.
The word engage is the most important thing when it comes to creating a strong brand. From day one, any time someone would comment I would comment back to them- and I started to understand our audience really quickly. I probably spent 3 or 4 hours a day on our social media channel replying to people.
I realised that athletes were my customers- they were the people I wanted to sell too. We wrote to them with a 15% discount offer, and the chance to become an agent to help fund their club. I must have got 200 agents signed-up and the business started to grow.
Instead of saying 'I'm a technology entrepreneur…' you might say, 'well, I run a technology business, but I love philosophy and playing the piano…' the person you're speaking to now has a few more dots to connect!
Never was wealth the driver for me. – it was always hey, there's a cool idea here, let's make something of it. It was nice to be well rewarded, but the interesting part was working the problem, thinking about new things and how to bring them forward from being ideas to being products or new ways of doing things.
That was when I thought, 'am I going to be someone who only wants to do music when it's all going well? And only when it's served to me on a plate? Or do I want to do this… no matter what…' For me, there was nothing else, I wanted to make music.
In the early days it was controversy… I remember, back then, thinking that there was something good about not being acceptable to everyone… it made us stand out from the crowd, and courted press attention.
It's a combination of passion, vision, creativity and a sense of adventure.
I started my entrepreneurship journey straight out of college, and at the time my goal was simple. I didn't want a real job, and I didn't want to wear a suit…. Anything more than that was a bonus.
True grit is that rare strength and resilience to dust yourself off, look at what went wrong, refine your proposition and plough on. Always be prepared to adapt: an open mind is everything – but stay focused on your end game.
I'm genuinely convinced that the upcoming decade will be the era of India as a product nation. This presents a tremendous opportunity for India, and you might wonder why now? Broadly, it's a confluence of a few factors. First, the global demand driven by digital transformation isn't limited to Fortune 500 companies. We're discussing the Fortune 5 million here – from a small-scale apparel retailer, a neighbourhood restaurant to a colossal multinational, they all need to adopt technology.