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If you have a start-up, you start out with an idea, but in 6 months you realise 'that wasn't the right idea'. This is how truly creative companies work. Nobody can do that with EU funding because you are locked-in to your original proposal – and because of that no-one I know in the start-up world wants money from the EU.
— Toomas Hendrik Ilves
Former President of Estonia & Cybersecurity Pioneer
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More important than picking specific industries, what matters is ensuring competitive and innovative companies that are able to compete in international markets.
— Antonio Costa
Former Prime Minister of Portugal (2015-2024)
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We adopted a National Strategy for Entrepreneurship: Startup Portugal. A strategy that aims to make Portugal the ideal space to create, test, fail and try again.
— Antonio Costa
Former Prime Minister of Portugal (2015-2024)
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If very damaging, asymmetries can destroy markets- causing them to unwind from the top- this is the adverse selection problem. People with high quality products remove them from the market due to the price being an average… the quality drops, then the price drops again.. and you end up with a cycle.
— Michael Spence
Nobel Prize-winning economist; Stanford provost and NYU president
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I have argued, along with Nassim Taleb, that one of the sources of overconfidence in our ability to forecast the future is the great ease with which we find explanations for the past. That's a very significant mechanism that produces overconfidence.
— Daniel Kahneman
Nobel Prize Winner in Economics for Behavioral Economics Research
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The current Trump–Silicon Valley consensus—that all forms of regulation somehow constrain the muscular freedom of companies to innovate—is ludicrous.
— Nick Clegg
Deputy Prime Minister of the UK (2010-2015) & Liberal Democrat Leader
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One of the great ironies of a company like Meta, where I worked, is that well over 90% of its users are outside the US, yet well over 90% of the bandwidth among decision-makers is focused on what's happening in America. In the end, that just doesn't make sense.
— Nick Clegg
Deputy Prime Minister of the UK (2010-2015) & Liberal Democrat Leader
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If you make it easy to steal from you, someone will. Every breach I've been involved with comes down to the fact that someone in the company did something they weren't supposed to or failed to do something they should have done.
— Frank Abagnale
Notorious con artist and impostor who inspired the film "Catch Me If You Can
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Criminals are not looking for challenges, but opportunities. Hackers don't cause breaches, they wait for doors to open; and we're making it so easy for people to steal from us that we're creating unlimited doors.
— Frank Abagnale
Notorious con artist and impostor who inspired the film "Catch Me If You Can
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We live in a very unethical society. We don't teach ethics at home, schools or university. As a consequence most businesses don't have a code of ethics or conduct.
— Frank Abagnale
Notorious con artist and impostor who inspired the film "Catch Me If You Can
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Most every decision that your team will make is independent of you as a leader. Once in a while, they may update you or ask you a question, but the vast majority of decisions are made either individually, or inside teams- and if those individuals and teams don't know what that end-game truly looks like, the odds of them making the right decision at any moment in time diminishes.
— Chris Hadfield
Canadian Astronaut & International Space Station Commander
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When you love what you do, when you're excited about your field, when you've chosen a path that connects with you personally- you will learn fast, you will accomplish in 5 years what it would take others 15 years to do.
— Robert Greene
Author of "The 48 Laws of Power" & Strategist
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Research shows that empowering women to gain financial independence generates lasting impact, with women typically investing 90% of their income back into their families. In addition to this, McKinsey estimates that if women and men were to play an identical role in labour markets across the world, an extra $28 trillion would be added to the global economy by 2025.
— Cherie Blair
Wife of former UK Prime Minister Tony Blair & Human rights lawyer
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If something goes wrong – as a leader, you take ownership – you cannot blame anyone else. If you are in charge of a team, you absolutely have to take ownership when something goes wrong, it's your fault.
— Jocko Willink
Former Navy SEAL Commander & Leadership Author
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When you fail, you take ownership of the failure, and then you assess what mistakes were made, what could be done differently, what better instructions you could have given, what better support you could have given, then you fix those problems, move on and try again, simple.
— Jocko Willink
Former Navy SEAL Commander & Leadership Author
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The venture capital industry exists to get capital in the hands of deserving entrepreneurs, but the data tells us that venture capitalists often have only a narrow definition of what 'deserving' means—and it often corresponds to being white and male.
— Melinda Gates
Co-Founder of Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Global Health Advocate