From 600+ conversations with the world’s leading thinkers.
Either as a startup founder or a venture capital investor, you should not care about what others believe to be exciting or overhyped. Do your own primary research and make up your own mind.
You don't have to choose a business that's going to drown you, be a treadmill, or suck you underneath. You can start slow, make a bit of money and then double down. You don't have to risk it all at the beginning.
80% of self-made billionaires we studied made their mark in mature, competitive markets. They weren't all 'exactly' new products that came out – they were maybe a variation of a business model or existing product that pleased the customer in a different way. Think of Howard Schulz with Starbucks, or Sara Blakeley with Spanx for example.
You can look at building a startup much like a resource management game. In the world of startups, the things that really matter are talent and capital! If you have a large supply of talent, and a lot of capital, you'll win every time.
I don't believe in a one-size-fits-all approach for talent, you have to approach every individual and opportunity from a bespoke perspective.
Organizations fail when leaders fail to write-down their own depreciating intellectual capital, and bureaucracies exaggerate that problem by vesting so much power in so few people. Most change management programs are in-fact catch-up programs.
Just get in the goddam car and get driving. Things will go wrong… plans may go half-cocked… you're not an idiot, you're not going to burn money… just be smart and get driving.
Simply put, a great business will understand its customers, have a clear, sound strategy and a business plan that can deliver against it.
We've had hierarchical and bureaucratic structures as far back as we can go in human history. The Chinese civil service goes back to at least 2000BC and militaries have always been structured as hierarchical. Modern bureaucracy is a mash-up of two ideas. Firstly, the command and control structures which have been core to organized human activity for millennia and secondly, the principles of industrial economics.
As an economy is declining, we see an increase in sell-side interest across all asset classes, as holders are looking to get liquidity and shore up their own balance sheets. As far as an up-economy, that's where we see buy-side interest as buyers get greater risk-tolerance.
Business problems are idea problems because like most other problems we face, they do not have one answer. The reality is, for any of the problems we face, there are a thousand possible answers.
The people who started working at Chobani... the minute they had a job, the minute they started working, that's when they lost the sense of being a refugee and became part of the community. That was the moment they started to regain their dignity and became independent.