From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
You are going to have to get out there and sell yourself. Make a fool of yourself – whatever it takes. Make sure you appear on the front page and not the back pages.
We only make progress by getting up from getting kicked to the ground. How does a baby learn to walk? It falls, gets back up… falls, gets back up, and one day its running. You will fall, stumble and fail- that's inevitable. You need to analyse it when it happens, learn from those mistakes, and move on. Don't dwell on failure.
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.
I dreamt of Farfetch for the love of fashion. I was absolutely determined to create something in the intersection of both fashion and tech – my two passions.
Taking that first step is your biggest competitive advantage; most people won't do it.
Instead of saying 'I'm a technology entrepreneur…' you might say, 'well, I run a technology business, but I love philosophy and playing the piano…' the person you're speaking to now has a few more dots to connect!
I had a brand who said to me 'You shouldn't name your book wonderhell, nobody is going to buy a book they don't know what the word on the front cover means', and I replied, anybody who's in wonderhell will know what that word means the second they see the word.
When China started its open-door policy, 40 years ago, it was a much different environment. There was nothing to work with! It was a communist system before that, a planned economy, no free market. People started building things from scratch.
He was just always looking for that hockey stick effect, and he would always tell me, and others, that you might get it 60% right, but go for the 100% right. And that might just be turning one other lever to the right or to the left.
You should try and copy everything you possibly can! It's just that if you run out of alternatives, if you run out of options to copy, you will realise that your entire life has conditioned you to not only be a great copier, but to hesitate when copying is no longer an option.
One of the defining experiences I had with CNET, a digital media company where I was the fourth employee back in the dawn of the internet, was recognizing the power of asking for help.
Entrepreneurship is not for everybody, and it's also worth noting that you're not entitled to be a great entrepreneur. You're not entitled to be successful if you start a company, in fact the most likely outcome is that you won't be. Sometimes I meet founders and entrepreneurs who complain about how hard their fundraising or engineering challenges are… Guess what… yes…. It's really f***ing hard. That's the truth.