From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
In business, you get incredible highs and lows… and it can take a decade of work before you start to see the story, and so having peer networks around you helps you realise other people have been through this.
Choosing not to rely on outside funding offers greater freedom overall. While there's significant sacrifice upfront, about 10 years down the line, you begin to truly value the autonomy it provides.
There are two different types of founders. A wartime founder – when things are tough, they act and a poor peacetime founder – it is really fun or nice to work for.
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.
I don't believe there's a universal formula for success—I can only share what worked for me, which was driven by enthusiasm for new ideas. What I value most in people is enthusiasm—not passion, which I find overused—but genuine enthusiasm to see opportunities and act upon them.
When you're identifying talent in music or other industries- one of the most important things to identify is which of those individuals is able to marry talent with extraordinary drive.
Innovative companies are not afraid of failure – they're willing to take risks, fail forward, learn from missteps, pivot, and keep going.
Being an entrepreneur, or even running a large organization, is like being a society builder. The system is bigger than any individual. When you build a business, you're architecting and constructing something substantial.
Viewing entrepreneurship as experimentation allows individuals and societies to evaluate businesses and technologies in domains with greater uncertainty than otherwise possible, unlocking deep growth opportunities.
Success is really a portal into the next stage that we're possibly capable of doing, and we have to decide how we're going to face that tsunami of emotions that then comes flying at us when we thought all we were going to have was happiness.
When you choose not to raise funds... think of it in terms of stages or ladders. These years give you knowledge capital, valuable relationships both within and outside the company, and other vital assets. From there, think of bootstrapping like a multi-stage booster rocket, where each stage propels and prepares you for the next, and the momentum continues building.
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….