From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Entrepreneurs that do it for greed of money fail. Entrepreneurship isn't about greed, it has nothing to do with that; what matters is personal freedom.
I've been fortunate not to be formally trained in any of these disciplines. I don't know how to play music, nor do I know how to code, but I have a strong sense of what the market wants. Around that, I build a team of people who are skilled at execution.
My wife Freada coined a phrase, distance travelled. We're very interested in where somebody started in life, and what hurdles and barriers they have already overcome in their journey – and how that grit has got them to where they are now. That's an indicator of resilience, persistence, and many other character traits that are significant in terms of entrepreneurial success.
I'm not saying that we should take-on less stress… the problem with the narratives around hustle-culture is that these narratives operate on one paradigm… you should either be working really hard, nor not working too hard.. that's a really primitive conversation. To be successful, you have to overcome a level of stress that would break most people. Building a company is not a sprint, it's a marathon… if you look at the world's best marathon runners, they're running in 4 minute miles. You have to learn how to take on an incredible amount of stress, and sustain it for a really long time.
I wasn't thinking about success or being 'big' or creating a huge business. I was thinking about answering a need, a void, creating something that wasn't there before.
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.
The only way I can get truly invested in something is by doing it and understanding the full-stack of why and how it works, rather than playing a role in it- it's why I was so bad at working for other people… I learn through immersion.
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.
It is the difference between an investor asking, 'so, what's your product…' and 'so, what's your idea, and what steps can we take to turn that into a product.'
Entrepreneurship is on a pedestal; everyone wants to be one. Here's the truth, it sucks. Entrepreneurship is hard and almost everyone loses. You genuinely have to like getting beat-up. You genuinely have to like conflict. You genuinely have to have an enormous amount of patience.
You can have your best day and your worst day on the same day. There's so much happening at once, and everything happens so fast… the emotional highs and lows are tense.
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.