From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
there are no good musicians who do not have a good ear, no artists without a great imagination, no writers without an excellent command of the language. The same goes for our trade. It is not enough to know how to use a calculator or build sound financial models. You need to have vision. You should look at a business process as if it were a living thing; you need to sense its music.
Even though we'd achieved so much success, going solo felt like a clean slate that I could pursue on my own. I'm travelling the world, making music from my heart, making the videos of my dreams and working with a team who believe in me. It's been liberating!
For me it is extremely important that commercial interests and social benefits are not mutually exclusive, but that they can complement each other wonderfully so I always look out for products that are innovative, forward-thinking and offer a true value for society.
The sacrifice is perhaps a decade- and it's a total sacrifice- you may not see your kids, you may miss an entire cycle of your lives, but you're doing it to provide for them in the future in a way you never could if you were an employee.
The idea itself constitutes about 20% of the success, the remaining 80% hinges on execution. This understanding is vital for an early-stage investor to gauge the potential success of a venture.
One of the biggest myths in startup-land is this idea that the pinnacle of startups is building a venture-scale company, backed by venture capital, growing exceptionally fast and being OK with high failure rates as a result; in other words, returning a significant amount of capital to an investor rather than any other outcome.
The line between acceptable mitigated risk and recklessness is actually very thin— and it’s even more dangerous because it moves.
They talk about Steve Jobs having a reality distortion field…. but all the entrepreneurs I met who achieved great things had that. They all had a wilful denial of reality… against all evidence to the contrary they had to believe they would succeed.. that's ultimately what entrepreneurs do.
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.
I guess like any other entrepreneur, but Brown? – this may seem inconsequential, but sometimes, the 'them and us' in society only becomes apparent when pointed out.
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.
A lot of entrepreneurs don't make that switch. They cling to that brand identity of 'I'm an innovator,' still tinkering with the product while everyone else is saying, 'Hey, it's good enough — let's hire our first salesperson.'