50 Entrepreneurs -50 Words of Advice
PASSION & FAILURE
Jeff Bezos (Amazon) 'do something you are passionate about, don't try to just chase the hot passion of the day'.
Sergey Brin (Google) 'it's very rewarding when you are on to something that is going to make a big difference, it's a little bit harder, but the passion you bring with that also brings so much more energy to it that you are more likely to succeed'
Mark Zuckerberg (Facebook) 'so many things go wrong when you are starting a company, often people ask 'what mistakes should you avoid making', my answer to that question is; don't even bother trying to avoid mistakes because you are going to make tons of mistakes and the important thing is learning quickly from the mistakes and not giving up, there were things every single year in Facebook's existence that could have killed us and just moving forward and making progress seemed intractable, but you just kind of bounce back, you learn that nothing is impossible, you just have to kind of keep running through the walls'.
Michael Dell (Dell) 'people who look for great ideas to make money are not nearly as successful as those who say - what do I really love to do, what am I excited about, what do I know something about, what is compelling'.
Evan Williams (Blogger, Twitter, Medium) 'if this was not successful and if I got no money from it, would I want it to do well anyway, that's a great check to see if you really feel good about the idea and you have the passion'.
Robert Greene (Mastery) 'you have to show that you are the one person that can do it'.
Steve Jobs (Apple) 'it's so hard, if you don't follow your passion, any rational person will give up, so you must do it over a sustained period of time'.
Tony Fadell (Nest) 'when you are trying to do something different, there is going to be that gut moment/sense 'is this right - is this not right', if you're not having doubts, you're not pushing the boundaries far enough'.
Pierre Omidyar (eBay) 'go and do it, try and learn, you will fail but take that on to the next thing, don't let people you respect tell you it can't be done, just because they don't have the courage to try it'.
Biz Stone (Twitter) 'you have to have an emotional investment in what you are doing, if you don't love what you’re doing, failure is pretty much guaranteed, success is not guaranteed either, but failure is'.
Guy Kawasaki - (Apple) 'if you believe enough, you will see it, you need to foster the belief in what you are dreaming, then it becomes a reality, this is very different than saying I don't expect anybody to believe it until I see it, you need people to believe it before they can see it'.
PROBLEM & IDEA
Paul Graham (Y Combinator) 'most startups fail because they did not make something that people wanted, they made something that they thought people would want, they were in denial about whether it was actually any good or someone else came along and made something people wanted even more'.
Gary Vaynerchuk (Wine Library) ' if you know exactly what you want to be, you need to spend as much time as possible with people who are actually that already'.
Daniel Ek (Spotify) 'I question a lot of things, you can do that in a good way and a bad way, if you can get people to be motivated by why they are doing something, you should continuously be asking how to make things better'.
Drew Houston (DropBox) 'one way to conceptualize or make a good product (good engineering and design is part of it) is by maximizing the probability that someone shows up at the front door (of store or website) and ends up with a solved problem'.
Kevin Rose (Digg, Tiiny) 'we always ask ourselves what kind of new market this is creating, what part of my day am I spending on this, what problem is this solving, what am I doing about it, is there something here?'.
James Altucher (Choose Yourself) 'if you are not coming up with 10 ideas a day (on a notebook), then your idea muscle will atrophy, after 6 months of coming up with ideas every day you are like a machine, you will be surprised at how many ideas you can have'.
Sam Altman (Loopt) 'you want an idea for which you can say, I know it's a bad idea but here specifically is actually why it's a great one, you want to sound crazy but actually want to be right'.
Seth Godin (Marketing guru) 'people are paying for the story around a business...all I ask when I meet small business people is, what is your story, why should I pick you, why do I care about what you are doing, statistics and business metrics are not the way that I see that world'.
PURPOSE & VALUES
Steve Wozniak (Apple) 'don't necessarily feel that you have to have the home run on your first start, building for fun is one of the key things that drives you to think and think and think, but make it better, and better, and better than if you were doing it for a company, build things at first for yourself that you would want'.
Mark Cuban (Broadcast) 'for somebody that is aspiring to take things to the next level and surpass their wildest dreams, there is always going to have to be an element of luck, but more important is putting yourself in a business that can be ubiquitous and doesn't have limits, if it can't be something you can visualize every business and consumer using it, then it's going to be tough to scale and to have the perceived value'.
Ben Silbermann (Pinterest) 'the most important thing when you work with people is that you realize they must be lined up with what your goals are, that really sounds very basic, you can build a small company or you can build a huge Google, but you have to be really aligned on that'.
Tony Hsieh (Zappos) 'many corporations have core values or guiding principles, but the problem is usually that they are very lofty sounding, like a press release or marketing, they sound just like their competitors, maybe you learn about it on day one of your job, but then it becomes a meaningless plaque on the wall, we wanted commit-able core values and we hire or fire people based on those values, completely independent of their actual job performance'.
Andrew Mason (Groupon) 'our definition of values is 'the behavior or principles that you religiously (no amount of data will sway you from those principles) adhere to in your company', the degree to which you have the courage to maintain your conviction around those ideas is the degree to which you are going to be successful in the long-term'.
Danae Ringelmann (Indiegogo) 'don't think about how to get big really fast, that will happen if you actually build something super meaningful, don't think about the quickest way to success, think about what is the best way to build something that is important, and that the world really needs'.
Simon Sinek (Start With Why) 'why are some organizations and some leaders able to inspire, where others are not, everyone knows what they do, some know how they do it (differentiated value proposition, proprietary process, USP...), but very, very few people or organizations know why they do what they do (not just for profit-which is a result)...what is their purpose, cause, belief, and why does their organizations exist'.
EXECUTION & IMPLEMENTATION
Elon Musk (Tesla, SpaceX) 'constantly seek criticism, well thought-out critique of what ever you are doing is as valuable as gold, you should seek that from everyone you can but particularly from your friends'.
Dennis Crowley (foursquare) 'the best piece of advice we have figured out is to not let other people district you from what you are doing, there are always haters who say your idea is stupid, never going to work, someone will do it before you do, and if we had listened to all that negative feedback we would have never built things, we would have never built prototypes and that is how we got to where we are, we saw something we wanted to do and we just went out and built them, if you build stuff you like to use there's a chance that there's thousands of other people out there who want to use it to'.
Eric Ries (The Lean Startup) 'it's not just about doing focus groups and checking you vision, it's about integrating the concept of testing ideas rigorously throughout the development process, throughout the marketing process, and even as you scale'.
Leah Busque (TaskRabbit) 'what is the smallest possible test that you can run for this; idea, concept, theory, get it out there and get customers using it, because your customers are going to be the ones to tell you if it's really working or not'.
Anthony Casalena (Squarespace) 'there is some expectation that you have to have in your mind 'I'm going to change the world, make a dent in the Universe'...a kind of ambition, but it's actually OK early on to solve small problems in layers so that you actually get to a point where you have can compactly do that'.
Alexis Ohanian (Reddit, Hipmunk) 'what it comes down to is doing exceptional things for users (whether it's in community, connections or design), this is the big advantage as a startup, you can actually get away with doing that and make it the core part of why you are doing business'.
Jason Fried (Basecamp) 'you should be spending your money on teaching, and sharing, that might mean hiring a writer perhaps who will start writing and getting people to listen to what you are saying, you can't talk about yourself all the time, you have to talk about things that are relevant to your industry, and start to build that audience up'.
Alan Schaaf (Imgur) 'if you are not utilizing an online community then you are at a disadvantage to those who are, you could be asking online communities what they think about your ideas, what advice they have regarding what you are working on, not only will you hear from people who are passionate about the subject but you will be hearing from people all around the world, each with their own experiences and stories that can help you'.
Reid Hoffman (LinkedIn) 'when you have an idea, a classic mistake is to hold that idea close to you, that is a mistake because your actual competitive advantage is not that you have this idea that you lock away in the closet (you have no idea is this is accurate), your actual competitive advantage is that you are assembling the intelligence around; does this idea work, what is the right team, what is the right learning and by doing that...you are in motion'.
Jack Dorsey (Twitter, Square) 'the hardest thing to do when you start is that you have all these ideas (everyone has an idea) but it's really about executing the idea and building the idea, attracting other people to help you work on the idea, that is the biggest challenge, the way to begin is to get the idea out of your head (draw it out, talk about it, program it, or make it)'.
Brian Chesky (Airbnb) 'often times the best methodology is to start with the perfect experience and with just one person (user), get that right and then figure out how to scale to something great, instead of scaling something not so great and trying to prove it, because that's really hard to do'.
Peter Thiel (PayPal) 'when you are starting a new business you don't want to go after giant markets, you want to go after small markets, and you want to take over those markets quickly'.
LEADERSHIP & PEOPLE
Kevin Systrom (Instagram) 'you don't have to be the best, but you have to be dangerous, you have to learn just enough to be dangerous to build an idea, concept it and show it to the world, then it turns out there are lots of other people who are much better at doing that stuff than you are, but you need to find people who can be drawn to the idea that you build, then they end up taking it and making it even better'
Chris Sacca (Baller Investor) 'there are a lot of people from whom we can learn a lot, so don't underestimate anyone you come across, the smartest leader always go around the room and asked for everybody's opinion'.
Palmer Luckey (Oculus Rift) 'realize that you can't do everything, and even if you can, you shouldn't'.
Kamal Ravikant (AngelList) 'find a great partner no matter what it is that you are doing, look for someone with very high intelligence, high energy, and very high integrity, you need all three of those, you can't compromise on anyone of them, determining the level of integrity is something that takes a lot of time spent with someone in order to figure it out'.
Richard Branson (Virgin) 'a company is simply a group of people, as a leader of people you have to be; a great listener, a great motivator, and good at praising the best people, people are no different than flowers; if you water flowers they flourish, if you praise people they flourish, and that is a critical attribute of a leader'.
Andrew Ljung (Soundcloud) 'my job is to be the assistant for the rest of the company, my job is to make sure that people have what they need to 'kick ass', that's my job, if you don't have that then let me know because I'm not doing my job'.
Jessica Livingston - (Y Combinator) 'another quality that is important is, can I be flexible-minded or open-minded, you should have a vision for your idea and your product but, you need to be open to changes'.
Marc Andreessen (Andreessen Horowitz) 'the two things we really zero in on regarding people are; courage and genius (they sound simple), courage is about not giving up in the face of adversity and being absolutely determined to succeed, this is the one we talk about a lot because it's the one people can learn or can be forced to learn (it can be very painful), the genius part is a little bit hard to force yourself to do, courage without genius might not get you to where you need to go, but genius without courage almost certainly won’t'.
Justin Kan (Justin.tv Twitch) 'there are a lot of things that are outside of your control, a lot of external circumstances will determine the success of your idea and affect the outcome (market timing for this new kind of service, the economy, meeting the right people who will finance your company...), and you have to be OK with that'.
Tim Ferriss (4 Hour Work Week) 'optimism has a place, but even more so for the first time entrepreneur, you need to be pragmatically pessimistic, you need to define all the worst case scenarios in terms of; financial loss, time loss, etc., look at what you will learn if that happens and accept and come to terms with that before you ever start, if you don't do that and you go straight into battling the world and trying to conquer the world with rose colored glasses on, the first time you hit a major hiccup you're going to become really demoralized and you will quit'.
Dustin Moskovitz (Facebook) 'the reality is not so glamorous, there's an ugly side to being an entrepreneur and more importantly, what you are actually spending your time on is just a lot of hard work, you are basically just sitting at your desk, head down, focused, answering customer support emails, doing sales, figuring out hard engineering problems, so it's really important that you go in with your eyes wide open'.
Emmett Shear (Twitch) 'if you don't love it, you won't make it through the long period of pain that is inevitable, so make sure that you take care of yourself during the process, make sure you take care of your mental health, and your physical health while you are doing it because it's a long road'.
For those of us who who would prefer to watch a video presentation of these ideas please watch: http://www.academybridge.org/videogallery/50-entrepreneurs-50-words-of-advice/