From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
I always tell people to not risk their own money, and to get venture funding. You should fail fast and spend as little money as possible to get your ideas validated.
Today, entrepreneurship is fashionable, it's something you can develop in your character and strengthen. I'm not so sure… I believe that entrepreneurship is something you're born with, or not. I've met many highly intelligent, and incredibly bright people who have not been able to develop their ideas into sensible businesses. Entrepreneurship is not related to intelligence, it's something you have or don't have.
I scaled the business from just me, to 10,000 people some 20 years later. Scaling and keeping control of that business was practically impossible- I failed many times, but managed to succeed overall through sheer determination, hard-work and having very, very good people.
Everyone on the team strongly believes in the mission. This is the one thing we want to work on in our lives, and multiple people share that same sentiment. We've fallen in love with a very stubborn technical challenge. Convincing others is always hard—it requires conviction on both sides. What we've demonstrated is small-team speed: speed in hiring, speed in getting strong results, and speed in refining our intellectual understanding.
By using the Straight Line System, you can get yourself to a level where you're certainly good enough at sales, where your skill in that area is not going to be what holds you back in life.
I realized then that I was inadvertently alienating our core audience — the surf community. Despite their understanding of the UGG brand, our advertising was sending the wrong message. This led me to shift our advertising strategy. We started featuring young professional surfers in our ads, often with the UGG boots barely visible.
When we were first able to make approximately what our fathers made by doing performance, we considered ourselves completely successful and had no ambition beyond that. If we were playing fairs and cruise ships, we were happy.
While most people are uncomfortable with change we have a business built on analysing it. Our business takes advantage of challenges and the opportunities they provide.
I woke up every day both inspired and terrified by the thought of building something from scratch and helping to save lives. It's a pretty good way to live, being both inspired and terrified.
You have to be resilient and you have to find the right investors. Surround yourself with amazing investors who are experts.
Doing something which has a social purpose gives you the motivation to overcome the hurdles and obstacles that you will meet along the way. It gives you that inner strength when you're doing something and you know it's making a massive difference.
That confidence and perseverance can sometimes lead you to keep charging ahead headfirst, when what's really needed is a pause and a course adjustment. I think that's the challenge — and I talk about that in the book — when strengths get overused.