From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
You need to hire people who are smart, ideally smarter than you. There's a reason Google, Apple and their peers are filled with PhD's. The smarter your team (whether academically, or in experience) the more they will deliver.
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.
If this wasn't a huge opportunity, I wouldn't waste my time- most of our investors wouldn't. If we were producing luxury meat that is only aimed at Michelin Star restaurants. The number of people that can afford to eating Michelin star restaurants is relatively few, you're not going to make an impact on the climate, you're not going make an impact on the future of our kids.
One of the greatest skills you can have as an entrepreneur is loving to learn.
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.
Where decent jobs are scarce, women can achieve financial independence by becoming job creators rather than job seekers – providing, of course, that they have the right support and opportunities to do so.
If you fall flat on your face, at least you're moving forward. All you have to do is get back up and try again!
By far the most common is underestimating expenses. When industries do barely double-digits if their lucky, business plans ought not to be showing EBIT or EBITDA of 50-70% – that doesn't mean people are smart, it means they haven't understood the industry.
I see myself as someone who seeds ideas well, but others execute them far better. I learned this the hard way; if I'd continued running everything, neither business would have survived. So, my approach was simple: spend three years as a controlling megalomaniac, then completely let go.
If you have a great show, you have a great business. If you don't have a good show, you have no business. What it means is that show has to come first. Don't start the day by saying 'how many tickets am I going to sell today?'
You can't say, 'I want to change things, I want to lead!' and then say, 'I never want to be wrong, and I never want to fail…' There's no easy answer other than the fact that you have to see the conflict in your own mind and make your own choice.
I believe the traditional perception, which posits that success is merely an accumulation of advantages while failure is an accumulation of disadvantages, is overly simplistic. It's the disadvantages that offer a more fertile ground for learning, albeit for a smaller cohort. The depth of learning and engagement derived from tackling difficulties is substantially richer compared to that gleaned from facing advantages.