From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
If you take a trade that follows your process exactly and if that trade loses money, that was not a bad trade. It's only a bad trade if you deviate from your process and lose money. I would go further and say that if you deviate from your process and make money, it's still a bad trade.
They should be stress-testing their balance sheets and portfolios under a range of negative scenarios, and have sufficient capital and liquidity to withstand scenarios that are far out on the tail of the distribution of possible outcomes. The stress tests should account for potential bubbles in global asset markets.
Entrepreneurs have to focus on how a business makes money and focus on that rather than the expense side of the business. That also allows you to start quicker and instead of deferring your idea, you could get to market in 30 days.
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.
It's about finding the right balance between being bold, patient, and persistent. For me, it's about not thinking it's crazy to reach out to an Oscar winner or a billionaire, but realizing it takes patience and time.
I believe many of our new generation of entrepreneurs put too much significance on money, and not enough on ideas. If you have a great idea, and the skills to execute that idea, the money will come.
It certainly plays a much bigger role than was ever intended to. A number of financial institutions and contracts rely on LIBOR as the benchmark by which other rates are set. I don't think it was ever intended that LIBOR would play such a central role between so many institutions and contracts.
inspires because it has a huge emotional component, everybody feels very attached to it. At the same time, it's incredibly complex- and full of mind-bogglingly stupid things that make it more complex than it needs to be
The first thing to do for our ecology is not to use less electricity, it's to cease buying things that are not useful.
If you start with a solution, there's a risk you might construct something that no one finds useful, leading to immense frustration. But when you centre your efforts on the problem, it serves as the guiding North Star of your journey.
We adopted in Portugal a National Strategy for Entrepreneurship: Startup Portugal. A strategy that aims to make Portugal the ideal space to create, test, fail and try again.
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.