From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
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.
I'm just a person who loves to do things before others. I'm very open to listening to young people, and always have a good relationship with them. I'm curious. Thanks to this, I try to do things before they become huge – I feel the market, the world, and try to be more-close to the world today.
Small companies will get an idea and try to scale up. Big companies have to decide when to extend, when to extend and scale, and when to do something new. They need to build capabilities in terms of insight and execution to do the new thing.
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.
From day one, we said that we wanted to create value, create impact, and create inspiration. We're not going to build a business that just creates impact—we're not a nonprofit. We're not going to just create a company that inspires the next generation. We have to create value.
We were able to create a brand before we created a product – and that means that the spaces that we can now go into are so vast, because people know Deliciously Ella not just for a single food product but for an entire lifestyle play.
Just get in the goddam car and get driving. Things will go wrong… plans may go half-cocked… you're not an idiot, you're not going to burn money… just be smart and get driving.
If you manage to attain product-market fit, you'll thrive, but if you fail, your venture will falter. It's that simple. Product-market fit boils down to creating value for your customers.
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.
This is certainly something that is not without risk. We are pursuing an audacious goal, and we very well might fail. When NASA set the Moon landing challenge, it created a whole series of capabilities and technologies that we previously could not have imagined.
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.
One of the challenges in networking is everybody thinks it's making cold calls to strangers. Actually, it's the people who already have strong trust relationships with you, who know you're dedicated, smart, a team player, who can help you.