From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
You have to empower your board to make their own decisions, follow their instinct, and execute. Think of your board in many ways as a team of entrepreneurs that you're investing in, rather than as employees that you manage.
If people really want to do something, all they need to do is meet someone who's built something from scratch to show them that it can be done by someone just like them. That's how I started.
Entrepreneurship means a constant willingness to keep learning. It's about maintaining that start-up spirit—where you're forever young, and forever in crisis. It's about always having your mind on the business.
I never started off with money, I started off with love. The love of being an entrepreneur. The love of being a lawyer. The love of being an athlete. When you start off with love, people will love and respect you and you will always be monetarily rewarded.
Six years ago, I got a phone call in Boston, an investor asked me what I thought about cultured meat? ..my answer was that it's probably one of the stupidest ideas I've ever heard in my life.! And the question is, why? It's supposed to be obvious! When you take muscle cells, fat cells, or stem cells (that can become both muscle and fat), those cells don't grow very well outside of the body – they stop.
I was studying at Xavier's College, Mumbai doing my 11 standard, and I was taken ill with Typhoid. I was recuperating at home, and my closest friend Manisha saw a poster put-up in college which was basically a shout-out to all aspiring actors to audition for a campus based TV show. She knew I'd just done a 2 month production oriented drama workshop at Prithvi Theatre, and she called me and said, '…would you be interested? They're asking for pictures!' – I didn't have any, and didn't know how to go about getting headshots, and I wasn't well!
We characterise our ideal 'Substacker' in affectionate terms – we call them outsider nerds – they're outsiders insofar as they don't fit comfortably in the dominant media structure for whatever reason – perhaps they feel they can do better work outside of it.
I genuinely don't care about scrutiny – it's a zero on a scale of 1 to 10 for me. If the table goes cold, I'll walk out of the casino. I'm good… I've got my nest-egg… I'm happy. I do this every day because I like it and want to accomplish my goals.
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.
My fun statement is that if I see the same thing, three times in one week, from disparate news or information sources, I have to move quickly as it's a trend that's likely to happen.
Entrepreneurship is a way of life. For me, entrepreneurship has always been about being a builder. Whether it's about undiscovered artists or working with companies pre-launch, the build process is what attracts me.
Only when I spent a year and a half writing a book, did I realise how long it takes you to do something to get a tangible result. It makes you respect money more when it comes from something you create, rather than just trading back and forth with someone else's cash.