Emerging Entrepreneur Quotes

Firestarters are flexible. They recognize situational needs and are able to flow into the accessible role identity most relevant to overcome emergent challenges.

One of the newest figures to emerge on the world stage in recent years is the social entrepreneur. This is usually someone who burns with desire to make a positive social impact on the world, but believes that the best way of doing it is, as the saying goes, not by giving poor people a fish and feeding them for a day, but by teaching them to fish, in hopes of feeding them for a lifetime. I have come to know several social entrepreneurs in recent years, and most combine a business school brain with a social worker's heart. The triple convergence and the flattening of the world have been a godsend for them. Those who get it and are adapting to it have begun launching some very innovative projects.

Her emergence tapped into the public’s hunger to see a female entrepreneur break through in a technology world dominated by men. Women like Yahoo’s Marissa Mayer and Facebook’s Sheryl Sandberg had achieved a measure of renown in Silicon Valley, but they hadn’t created their own companies from scratch. In Elizabeth Holmes, the Valley had its first female billionaire tech founder.

The restaurant business is robust and successful precisely because individual restaurants are vulnerable and short-lived. Taleb wishes that society honoured ruined entrepreneurs as richly as it honours fallen soldiers.

we tend to think that innovation comes from bureaucratic funding, through planning, or by putting people through a Harvard Business School class by one Highly Decorated Professor of Innovation and Entrepreneurship (who never innovated anything) or hiring a consultant (who never innovated anything). This is a fallacy—note for now the disproportionate contribution of uneducated technicians and entrepreneurs to various technological leaps, from the Industrial Revolution to the emergence of Silicon Valley, and you will see what I mean.

Two fundamental advantages of the little bets approach are highlighted in the research of Professor Saras Sarasvathy: that it enables us to focus on what we can afford to lose rather than make assumptions about how much we can expect to gain, and that it facilitates the development of means as we progress with an idea. Sarasvathy points to the value of what she calls the affordable loss principle. Seasoned entrepreneurs, she emphasizes, will tend to determine in advance what they are willing to lose, rather than calculating expected gains.

Our problem is not to trace the emergence of a world market, of a sufficiently active class of private entrepreneurs, or even (in England) of a state dedicated to the proposition that the maximization of private profit was the foundation of government policy...By the 1780s we can take the existence of all these for granted...

In her TED talk, Dr. Duckworth said, “One characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. It wasn’t social intelligence. It wasn’t good looks, physical health, and it wasn’t IQ. It was grit. Grit is a passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is stamina. . . . Grit is living life like it’s a marathon and not a sprint.

The cultural Left has contributed to the formation of this politically useless unconscious not only by adopting “power” as the name of an invisible, ubiquitous, and malevolent presence, but by adopting ideals which nobody is yet able to imagine being actualized. Among these ideals are participatory democracy and the end of capitalism. Power will pass to the people, the Sixties Left believed only when decisions are made by all those who may be affected by the results. This means, for example, that economic decisions will be made by stakeholders rather than by shareholders, and that entrepreneurship and markets will cease to play their present role. When they do, capitalism as we know it will have ended, and something new will have taken its place. […] Sixties leftists skipped lightly over all the questions which had been raised by the experience of non market economies in the so-called socialist countries. They seemed to be suggesting that once we were rid of both bureaucrats and entrepreneurs, “the people” would know how to handle competition from steel mills or textile factories in the developing world, price hikes on imported oil, and so on. But they never told us how “the people” would learn how to do this. The cultural Left still skips over such questions. Doing so is a consequence of its preference for talking about “the system” rather than about specific social practices and specific changes in those practices. The rhetoric of this Left remains revolutionary rather than reformist and pragmatic. Its insouciant use of terms like “late capitalism” suggests that we can just wait for capitalism to collapse, rather than figuring out what, in the absence of markets, will set prices and regulate distribution. The voting public, the public which must be won over if the Left is to emerge from the academy into the public square, sensibly wants to be told the details. It wants to know how things are going to work after markets are put behind us. It wants to know how participatory democracy is supposed to function. The cultural Left offers no answers to such demands for further information, but until it confronts them it will not be able to be a political Left. The public, sensibly, has no interest in getting rid of capitalism until it is offered details about the alternatives. Nor should it be interested in participatory democracy –– the liberation of the people from the power of technocrats –– until it is told how deliberative assemblies will acquire the same know-how which only the technocrats presently possess. […] The cultural Left has a vision of an America in which the white patriarchs have stopped voting and have left all the voting to be done by members of previously victimized groups, people who have somehow come into possession of more foresight and imagination than the selfish suburbanites. These formerly oppressed and newly powerful people are expected to be as angelic as the straight white males were diabolical. If I shared this expectation, I too would want to live under this new dispensation. Since I see no reason to share it, I think that the left should get back into the business of piecemeal reform within the framework of a market economy. This was the business the American Left was in during the first two-thirds of the century. Someday, perhaps, cumulative piecemeal reforms will be found to have brought about revolutionary change. Such reforms might someday produce a presently unimaginable non market economy, and much more widely distributed powers of decision making. […] But in the meantime, we should not let the abstractly described best be the enemy of the better. We should not let speculation about a totally changed system, and a totally different way of thinking about human life and affairs, replace step-by-step reform of the system we presently have.

In the movie La La Land, Mia has to put on a brave face at auditions, then put on her best clothes and go out on the town with the little money she could scrounge up, trying to find a way to meet the difference-makers in Hollywood. Even when she was about ready to give up, she ultimately came back for one more reading, the one that made her a big star. Almost every Hollywood actor who is successful today has a real-life story like that. Their goal was the same as everyone in the business world: to land a big fish. People noticed Natalie Portman and John Wayne the way they eventually noticed Mia. No one would have bought what she was selling if she hadn’t presented herself like a winner, even when she was on the verge of moving back into her parents’ place in Boulder City. My mom will tell you I wanted to be a millionaire by seven years old. It was always on my mind. So from day one of my business career I acted the part. I had no money but I dressed like a professional. I wore a suit, which was the thing to do back then. It wasn’t anything fancy, but it was pressed and clean. Bottom line is, if you’re shooting for the moon, you better act like an astronaut.

As we’ve seen, one of the most frequently pursued paths for achievement-minded college seniors is to spend several years advancing professionally and getting trained and paid by an investment bank, consulting firm, or law firm. Then, the thought process goes, they can set out to do something else with some exposure and experience under their belts. People are generally not making lifelong commitments to the field in their own minds. They’re “getting some skills” and making some connections before figuring out what they really want to do. I subscribed to a version of this mind-set when I graduated from Brown. In my case, I went to law school thinking I’d practice for a few years (and pay down my law school debt) before lining up another opportunity. It’s clear why this is such an attractive approach. There are some immensely constructive things about spending several years in professional services after graduating from college. Professional service firms are designed to train large groups of recruits annually, and they do so very successfully. After even just a year or two in a high-level bank or consulting firm, you emerge with a set of skills that can be applied in other contexts (financial modeling in Excel if you’re a financial analyst, PowerPoint and data organization and presentation if you’re a consultant, and editing and issue spotting if you’re a lawyer). This is very appealing to most any recent graduate who may not yet feel equipped with practical skills coming right out of college. Even more than the professional skill you gain, if you spend time at a bank, consultancy, or law firm, you will become excellent at producing world-class work. Every model, report, presentation, or contract needs to be sophisticated, well done, and error free, in large part because that’s one of the core value propositions of your organization. The people above you will push you to become more rigorous and disciplined, and your work product will improve across the board as a result. You’ll get used to dressing professionally, preparing for meetings, speaking appropriately, showing up on time, writing official correspondence, and so forth. You will be able to speak the corporate language. You’ll become accustomed to working very long hours doing detail-intensive work. These attributes are transferable to and helpful in many other contexts.

Soul can’t exist unless you have active, meaningful dialogue with stakeholders: employees, customers, the community, suppliers, and investors. When you launch a business, your job as the entrepreneur is to say, ‘Here’s a value proposition that I believe in. Here’s where I’m coming from. This is my point of view.’ At first, it’s a monologue. Gradually it becomes a dialogue and then a real conversation. Like breaking in a baseball glove. You can’t will a baseball glove to be broken in; you have to use it. Well, you have to use a new business, too. You have to break it in. If you move on to the next thing too quickly, it will never develop its soul. Look what happens when a new restaurant opens. Everyone rushes in to see it, and it’s invariably awkward because it hasn’t yet developed soul. That takes time to emerge, and you have to work at it constantly.

We face the most compelling era of mankind: exponential growth of new technologies, cheaper electronic devices and the globalization of knowledge, commerce, and ideas along with the rapid growth of emerging markets of colossal sizes will generate the best opportunities, connections, higher risks and challenges for everyone.

If one considers the characters in the plays of Shakespeare, in the poems of the Roman poet Ovid, in the Greek tragedies of Sophocles and Euripides, and even in the hieroglyphics of ancient Egypt, they can be recognized in our daily lives. Their actions were driven by the same motives as ours—ambition, love, pride, fear, anger, sympathy, and fun.

In Seattle, Washington, in 1971, Howard Schultz, the owner of a local coffee roasting and distribution company, noted the increasing affluence of the American public and their desire to receive gracious treatment in their daily activities. Schultz recognized that there was a market for small businesses featuring top quality coffee and an opportunity to relax in an attractive environment. To take advantage of these emerging Minitrends, Mr. Schultz initiated the very successful Starbucks chain which offers top quality coffee drinks in a friendly and relaxed atmosphere Starbucks has a long record of appreciating Minitrends, but failed to recognize the trend that more economically-stressed customers were beginning to opt for similar, lower-cost drinks offered by fast food restaurants such as McDonald’s. While still popular, in summer 2008, the Starbucks company announced the termination of 1,000 employees, and in November 2008, the company reported a 98 percent decline in profit for the third quarter of the year. To be more economically competitive, Starbucks has recently introduced a line of instant coffee.

My premise is that startups and emerging companies should adopt a new, simple approach—start small, stay lean, raise only the funding you really need, grow the business judiciously and then execute an early exit.

Bill Gates, like other legendary figures in the information technology industry (such as Paul Allen, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Larry Page, Sergey Brin, and Jeff Bezos), had immense talent and ambition. But he ultimately responded to incentives. The schooling system in the United States enabled Gates and others like him to acquire a unique set of skills to complement their talents. The economic institutions in the United States enabled these men to start companies with ease, without facing insurmountable barriers. Those institutions also made the financing of their projects feasible. The U.S. labor markets enabled them to hire qualified personnel, and the relatively competitive market environment enabled them to expand their companies and market their products. These entrepreneurs were confident from the beginning that their dream projects could be implemented: they trusted the institutions and the rule of law that these generated and they did not worry about the security of their property rights. Finally, the political institutions ensured stability and continuity. For one thing, they made sure that there was no risk of a dictator taking power and changing the rules of the game, expropriating their wealth, imprisoning them, or threatening their lives and livelihoods. They also made sure that no particular interest in society could warp the government in an economically disastrous direction, because political power was both limited and distributed sufficiently broadly that a set of economic institutions that created the incentives for prosperity could emerge. This

Entrepreneurs are favored in neoliberal contexts because they prize ingenuity, self-invention, adaptation, dispensing with establishment hierarchies, and self-mastery. Church planting can be read as a religious incarnation of late modernity's entrepreneurial disposition.

The “self-actualization” philosophy from which most of this new bureaucratic language emerged insists that we live in a timeless present, that history means nothing, that we simply create the world around us through the power of the will. This is a kind of individualistic fascism. Around the time the philosophy became popular in the seventies, some conservative Christian theologians were actually thinking along very similar lines: seeing electronic money as a kind of extension for God’s creative power, which is then transformed into material reality through the minds of inspired entrepreneurs. It’s easy to see how this could lead to the creation of a world where financial abstractions feel like the very bedrock of reality, and so many of our lived environments look like they were 3-D-printed from somebody’s computer screen. In fact, the sense of a digitally generated world I’ve been describing could be taken as a perfect illustration of another social law—at least, it seems to me that it should be recognized as a law—that, if one gives sufficient social power to a class of people holding even the most outlandish ideas, they will, consciously or not, eventually contrive to produce a world organized in such a way that living in it will, in a thousand subtle ways, reinforce the impression that those ideas are self-evidently true.

Understanding these six interaction drivers helps entrepreneurs and managers give new strategic direction to the platform.

Most entrepreneurs and managers looking to build the next Airbnb for X or Facebook for Y, dive into the problem headlong by building technology. Instead, technology should be built only after understanding the interaction that needs to be enabled. Without this in mind, one often ends up with a platform that nobody wants to use. Build platforms with an interaction-first, not a technology-first mindset!

Platform Pivot A platform pivot refers to a change from an application to a platform or vice versa. Most commonly, startups that aspire to create a new platform begin life by selling a single application, the so-called killer app, for their platform. Only later does the platform emerge as a vehicle for third parties to leverage as a way to create their own related products.

John Battelle, a healthy San Francisco media entrepreneur with a wife and two teenagers, initially had his doubts about whether it made sense to pay thousands of dollars per month to Dr. Shlain to treat his generally healthy family. But then Battelle’s teenage son broke his leg during a suburban soccer game after school. Naturally the first call his parents made was to 911. The second was to Dr. Shlain. “They’re taking him to a local hospital,” Battelle’s wife, Michelle, told Dr. Shlain as the boy rode in an ambulance to a nearby emergency room in Marin County. “No, they’re not,” Dr. Shlain instructed them. “You don’t want that leg fracture set by an ER doc at a local medical center. You want it set by the head of orthopedics at a hospital in the city.” Within minutes, the ambulance was on the Golden Gate Bridge, bound for California Pacific Medical Center, one of San Francisco’s top hospitals. Dr. Shlain was there to meet the Battelles when they arrived, and their son was seen almost immediately by an orthopedist with decades of experience.

Ka method is designed to habilitate the ethnic entrepreneur and the entrepreneur in the informal economy to better fight, and not just failing to cope with emergencies, in a globalized economy. It draws its essence from the traditional forms of expression related to animism. Economic actors can thus learn from their own spirituality to develop strategies, tactics, and actions to run their business.

The British bankers at that time also controlled the fledgling American banks which offered to loan Abraham Lincoln money to fight the war. Lincoln wisely refused and created the famous Lincoln greenbacks with which he financed the Civil War.38 Abraham Lincoln, in a famous address, declared: “At what point, then, is the approach of danger to be expected? I answer, if it ever reach us it must spring up among us, it cannot come from abroad. If destruction be our lot, we must ourselves be its author and finisher. As a nation of freemen we must live through all time or die of suicide.” 39 Lincoln’s refusal to finance the Union through debt to the internationalists demonstrated his keen insight into their strategy for global dominion. Hence, he financed the Civil War by printing the Lincoln greenbacks. In both respects—with regard to the Civil War and the British bankers’ attempt to seize control of the economics of America—once again the aims of the globalists were frustrated. This is what caused Lincoln’s assassination. Nonetheless, America remained in control of her own credit. The result of this victory was low interest loans for entrepreneurs, which led to great business expansion. This great expansion in the post-Civil War era enhanced the fears of those who sought to bring the world into a One World Order. If America was allowed to continue to expand, she would be a major—perhaps insurmountable—obstacle in the way of their goal. For one hundred years, America was able to avoid total control of her capital by the international bankers. Lincoln was most certainly a great irritant and obstacle to the aspirations of the globalists. He was the last president to seek categorically a halting of the globalists’ drive toward a Global One World Government. It cost him his life; he was murdered by John Wilkes Booth, also an agent of the internationalists.40 America’s emergence from the Civil War as a great industrial power was due to the effective centralization of capital and credit within the Federal Government, thanks to Lincoln. It was America’s control over her own capital that was making her prosperous. It was the aim of the international bankers to change all that. Lincoln was the victim of a major conspiracy—a conspiracy so important that even the European bankers were involved. Lincoln had to be eliminated because he dared to oppose their attempt to force a central bank on the United States. He became an example to those who would later oppose such machinations in high places. Could it be that, one hundred years later, John F.

Emerging industries are usually based on changing markets, technologies, or demographics. They create new opportunities for entrepreneurs and offer an advantage to those who are willing to jump into a new industry.

These successful entrepreneurs had functional skills in emerging industries, enabling them to become pioneers in their fields. Table 1 shows some major industries that have emerged in the last 50 years. This suggests that a key factor for highly successful entrepreneurs is to acquire technology skills in emerging industries or technologies—on their own or with partners.

Many billion-dollar entrepreneurs got their start in emerging industries because they had skills in the industry. But they were not the first movers. When the industry emerged, they examined the leading products and improved upon them. They compared the benefits offered by the existing products with the unmet needs of the emerging market. This gave them a foothold, which they used to dominate the market. This suggests that first movers don’t always win. Imitators and improvers can do better if the first movers haven’t guessed right. In fact, first movers dominate only about 11 percent of the time.2

Venture capital has succeeded mainly when high-potential industries are emerging. Historically, VCs earned high returns from emerging, high-potential industries such as semiconductors, personal computers, biotechnology, and telecommunications in the 1970s and 1980s; Internet 1.0 in the 1990s; and Internet 2.0 in the 2000s. When there are no major industries at the emerging stage, VC returns have fallen.

Some entrepreneurs use their unique skills to develop their product or service to launch their business in emerging technologies. Established companies usually are not dominant in these emerging technologies, and the new ventures can gain a strong foothold before the dominant companies are aware of the opportunity—and the threat.

Emerging trends offer the prospect of entering when an industry is still forming. An emerging trend can be especially beneficial if large corporations find it difficult to jump on the trend without major disruptions to their existing business.

To find an advantage, entrepreneurs need to know how to develop products that better satisfy unmet needs, especially in emerging industries, emerging trends, or emerging markets.

Jobs was not a first-mover. He imitated and improved in an emerging technology to lead it. But he imitated and improved better than anyone else. He understood his market and offered convenience and style. He developed platforms around his core products, controlled the ecosystem of all the products and services being sold on Apple’s networks, and built one of the world’s greatest companies.

Unlike corporations that prefer evolutionary advances, VCs often prefer products or services that are based on emerging, revolutionary technologies.

VCs mostly invest in ventures that exploit revolutionary technologies that are not easily imitated by large corporations and after the basic research is done. This means that they exploit attractive basic research findings when the industry is emerging. In this emerging stage, the industry is growing and competitors are often newer and weaker. Although the risk is high due to the newness of the industry, the potential and the prospects for growth attract VC investment.

Before focusing only on a product, consider the total needs and experience of the ultimate customer. To make your platform more competitive, examine your customers’ unmet needs and your competitors’ weaknesses. Then seek the right technology advances and jump on the right, emerging trends.

A new industry, or an existing industry that is being impacted by a revolutionary trend, is chaotic. Highly successful entrepreneurs see through the chaos, noise, and clutter of a new, emerging industry or the patterns of change in a fragmented industry, and find the right opportunity and strategy to dominate it. That is the essence of revolutionary visioning.

After a successful launch, entrepreneurs need to know how to switch from venture mode to corporation mode. This means learning control skills to protect resources, organization skills to build a more productive organization and achieve goals, and leadership skills to dominate the emerging industry.

Norton defined a feral city as “a metropolis with a population of more than a million people, in a state the government of which has lost the ability to maintain the rule of law within the city’s boundaries yet remains a functioning actor in the greater international system.”47 This kind of city, Norton points out, has no essential services or social safety net. Human security becomes a matter of individual initiative—conflict entrepreneurs and community militias emerge, Mad Max style. And yet feral cities don’t just sink into utter chaos and collapse—they remain connected to international flows of people, information, and money. Nonstate groups step up to control key areas and functions, commerce continues (albeit with much corruption and violence), a black market economy flourishes, and massive levels of disease and pollution may be present, yet “even under these conditions, these cities continue to grow, and the majority of occupants do not voluntarily leave.

The Industrial Revolution was manifested in every aspect of the English economy. There were major improvements in transportation, metallurgy, and steam power. But the most significant area of innovation was the mechanization of textile production and the development of factories to produce these manufactured textiles. This dynamic process was unleashed by the institutional changes that flowed from the Glorious Revolution. This was not just about the abolition of domestic monopolies, which had been achieved by 1640, or about different taxes or access to finance. It was about a fundamental reorganization of economic institutions in favor of innovators and entrepreneurs, based on the emergence of more secure and efficient property rights. Improvements

I’ve come face-to-face with these two questions countless times as a writer, an entrepreneur, a painter, a musician, and even a lawyer. On a more immediate level, the questions relate to the project you’re working on. If you’re a painter creating a collection of work, you may start to feel the questions arise as you explore whether a canvas or the collection is taking shape as you have envisioned it. On a more expansive level, the question emerges in the context of whether you should even be a painter or a writer, a coder, an entrepreneur, a CEO. I’ve seen actors struggle to build careers for decades, never coming close to earning enough to cover their bills. Yet they keep on keeping on, because their big break could be one audition away. And this is what they feel called to do. These are some of the most difficult and defining moments every creator faces. I’ve been told by legendary entrepreneurs, “If you have to ask, assume it’s resistance and soldier on.” They claim that you just know whether or not a project is meant to be. But I’ve witnessed countless people commit to perpetually unsuccessful projects or careers or, on the other side of the spectrum, come a breath away from what would’ve been breakthrough success had they just held on a bit longer. So I began to explore a more systematic process, a set of benchmarks, tests, and questions that might better guide these moments and help people decide whether to keep leaning into the journey, alter their course, or walk away and do something entirely different. We start by asking, “What was your inciting motivation?” What made you undertake this endeavor to begin with. Was it, in some form, the expression of a calling? Was it something to keep you busy? Was it about serving a group of people, solving a problem, or serving up a delight? Was it about money or doing anything you could to get your parents off your back and avoid grad school? Begin by going back to the time surrounding your decision to create whatever it is you’re creating and answer this question. Then move on to the next question. In light of the information and experiences you’ve had along the journey to date, does that original motive still hold true? Are you still equally or even more determined to make it happen? And given what you now know, do you believe you can make it happen?

In 2009, Zeke and I decided to entertain suitors, in large part because Zeke’s charter school, the Equity Project, was in full swing.* It wasn’t an easy decision, but we felt that having a well-resourced parent would ensure that the company would thrive in the long term. After a competitive bidding process, we agreed to be acquired by Kaplan and the Washington Post Company in December of that year. I remember the day vividly. After all the documents were signed, I sat there and waited for the transfer to clear. I was sitting at my web browser, hitting refresh over and over again until it cleared in the late afternoon. And there it was. I let out a “Yeah!” and emerged from my office. I walked around dispensing checks to employees, as we had set aside a bonus pool for both staff and instructors. It’s a lot of fun giving away money. I was Asian Santa Claus for a day. I went home for the holidays the following week. At this point my parents were quite pleased with me; my assuming the mortgage on their apartment likely had something to do with that. I zeroed out my student loans that week too. I’d gone from scrapping and scrimping for almost a decade to being a thirty-four-year-old millionaire.

If this book has shown anything, it is that becoming a force in technological innovation or disruption far beyond Silicon Valley has never been easier than it is today—but unimpeded access to the internet is essential. New entrepreneurs worldwide are creating ways to collaborate and solve local, regional, and even global problems. And governments should note that while these innovators are passionate about their homes and culture, they have also never been more mobile. If pushed, they can seek out other countries that embrace their talent. In addition to losing their best and brightest, emerging nations will have trouble competing if their legal environments squelch innovation.

But the long-term result has been the emergence of a new managerial class, as the multinationals move in with their takeover bids, their legal privileges and their transnational lobbyists for whom small businesses and entrepreneurs are the enemy. Those who object to this new managerialism (and I am one of them) should nevertheless recognize that what is bad in it is precisely what was bad in the old corporatist economy that Thatcher set out to destroy. When she claimed that entrepreneurs create things, while managers entomb them, it was immediately apparent that she was right, since the effects of the management culture lay all around us.

What’s behind you is not important. No one will remember where you started. They’ll only remember where you finish.

Research suggests that in over 90 percent of all successful new businesses, historically, the strategy that the founders had deliberately decided to pursue was not the strategy that ultimately led to the business’s success.12 Entrepreneurs rarely get their strategies exactly right the first time. The successful ones make it because they have money left over to try again after they learn that their initial strategy was flawed, whereas the failed ones typically have spent their resources implementing a deliberate strategy before its viability could be known. One of the most important roles of senior management during a venture’s early years is to learn from emergent sources what is working and what is not, and then to cycle that learning back into the process through the deliberate channel.

Europeans had highly developed regional and national cultures and societies before they bolted on Protestantism. America, on the other hand, was half-created by Protestant extremists to be a Protestant society. American academics accept the idea of American exceptionalism in one of its meanings—that our peculiar founding circumstances shaped us. “The position of the Americans,” Tocqueville wrote in Democracy in America, “is…quite exceptional,” by which he meant the Puritanism, the commercialism, the freedom of religion, the individualism, “a thousand special causes.” The professoriate rejects exceptionalism in today’s right-wing sense, that the United States is superior to all other nations, with a God-given mission. And they also resist the third meaning, the idea that a law of human behavior doesn’t apply here—scholars of religion insist that explanations of religious behavior must be universal. The latest scholarly consensus about America’s exceptional religiosity is an economic theory. Because all forms of religion are products in a marketplace, they say, our exceptional free marketism has produced more supply and therefore generated more demand. Along with universal human needs for physical sustenance and security, there’s also such a need for existential explanations, for why and how the world came to be. Sellers of religion emerge offering explanations. From the start, religions tended to be state monopolies—as they were in the colonies, the Puritans in Massachusetts and the Church of England in the South. After that original American duopoly was dismantled and the government prohibited official churches, religious entrepreneurs rushed into the market, Methodists and Baptists and Mormons and all the others. European countries, meanwhile, kept their state-subsidized religions, Protestant or Catholic—and so in an economic sense those churches became lazy monopolies.*10 In America, according to the market theorists, each religion competes with all the others to acquire and keep customers. Americans, presented with all this fantastic choice, can’t resist buying. We’re so religious for the same reason we’re so fat.

Some of the most noted angel investors are Alexis Ohanian (founder of Reddit), Marc Benioff (founder of Salesforce) and Max Levchin (founder of Paypal, Slide and Affirm) who on occasion invest in early stage and growth rounds as well. If the core product of the business begins to gain market share, and it seems the company has a lasting opportunity to scale and become an emerging leader, investors like First Round Capital and 500 Startups step in at the seed or Series A round. Growth equity firms like Stripes Group, General Atlantic and Insight Venture Partners typically come in at the Series C or D stage when the business becomes the number one or two player in the industry and is ripe for an IPO or strategic acquisition.

entrepreneurs do not try to avoid errors or surprises. They seek to learn from them, just as chefs often arrive at new recipes through improvisation.

Later that year, billionaire entrepreneur Elon Musk developed cold symptoms and decided to take four tests—same day, same test, same nurse. Two came back positive, and two came back negative. “Something extremely bogus is going on,” he said. Musk was right. It would take the CDC until July 21, 2021 to acknowledge that the PCR test is so faulty as to be clinically useless, revoking its emergency use authorization…but prospectively, and not until December 31.

I was in charge of decisions and marketing, and Sean was in charge of research and operations. When we were trying to identify our target customer, he spent a ton of time putting together spreadsheets comparing all the different markets we should consider. When he showed them to me and asked me what I thought, I replied, “Yoga.” Huh? “We could easily do multiple products serving people who do yoga,” I told him. “It’s an emerging trend. And I know a ton of those people; I can ask them what they want. Let’s start a yoga business.” Sean’s initial response was, “That’s not a quantitative analysis, Ryan!” I’ve never been one to overthink things—most people spend way too much time in the research period. I make decisions fast and adjust later. With our target customer identified, we made a list of possible products and chose our gateway product—a yoga mat. With that, we began the process of product development. We looked up the top-selling yoga mats on Amazon and read through the reviews; we asked questions on Facebook groups, subreddits, and Instagram influencer accounts. It didn’t take long before we had an idea of the main pain points we needed to address with our first product. I remembered Don’s advice and began looking for people to make the product. With a quick scroll and a click, we could choose between a wholesaler in China, a private label supplier out of India, or a contract manufacturer in Vietnam. For about fifty bucks, we were able to order a set of yoga mat samples that had the exact features we were looking for. It was that easy. Samples in hand, we needed to refine our product idea to make sure we were really hitting the pain points we’d identified. At that time, I’d done yoga maybe two or three times in my life, and I wasn’t nearly the right demographic for our mats anyway. That forced me to ask questions. We were targeting yoga-loving millennials, so I went where they often congregate: Starbucks. There, I did the kind of tough field work that really makes an entrepreneur sweat: asking young women questions over coffee. “Which yoga mat do you prefer? Why?” “What makes the difference between a bad yoga mat and a good one?” “What’s wrong with your current yoga mat?” “What do you think of this one? And what about this one?” Next, I headed over to local yoga studios to see how our samples stacked up against the strenuous demands of a yoga class. A few classes later, Sean and I had everything we needed to narrow down our product development. Armed with all our data, we went back to the manufacturers. From a couple yoga-clueless guys, we’d become knowledgeable enough to know not just what a good yoga mat looked like, but how it had to feel and perform. We knew what we needed our yoga mat to do. Now we just had to find the manufacturer to supply it.

Sonnet of Renewable Energy There is a plug point in the sky, Which is beaming electricity 24/7. Yet we drill holes into the earth, To suck oil and power our concrete heaven. When humankind first started drilling, They had no idea of its implication. But eventually scientists raised warnings, Yet drilling continued due to lack of efficient solution. Fossil fuel has already damaged the climate, And we no longer have time for scholarly fight. So I say to scientists, engineers and entrepreneurs, Come up with affordable home solar-grid. Electric cars won't do anything for climate emergency, Unless all electricity comes from renewable energy.

Entrepreneurship isn't about starting an existing business or working on an existing idea or concept developed before but Entrepreneurship is all about understanding emerging challenges and providing solutions in a way that inspires innovation, creativity, and critical thinking.

By the mid-1990s, new businesses were beginning to emerge. Analyst Igor Bunin published an influential book in 1994 that profiled forty entrepreneurs

Coca-Cola’s other profitable variation arose serendipitously. For two years, Candler was pestered by an entrepreneur from Chattanooga, Benjamin Franklin Thomas, who wanted to bottle Coca-Cola. In 1889, Candler reluctantly agreed to Thomas’s plan. The bottling of Coke was an instant success, leading to high profits for the company and bottlers. For Coca-Cola, bottlers created a huge new market without any capital need. By 1904 there were more than 120 bottling plants throughout the US. Coca-Cola may be the first example in history of a company concentrating on its ‘core competencies’ (in this case, product formulation, branding and marketing) and outsourcing all capital-intensive functions. As a result, the company grew enormously without having to raise much external capital. And it all happened by chance. When competing colas emerged, Coke was able to command a substantial price premium. To this day, Coca-Cola has remained highly profitable. It currently has an operating margin of 26 per cent, instead of the 5 to 10 per cent typical in the food and beverage industry.

Peter doesn’t believe in beating the competition, he believes in escaping it altogether—either by entering an emerging field with no natural competitors or by moving so quickly and decisively that competitors have no hope of catching up.

Actions for Impact If you’re interested in working on your rethinking skills, here are my top thirty practical takeaways. I. INDIVIDUAL RETHINKING A. Develop the Habit of Thinking Again 1. Think like a scientist. When you start forming an opinion, resist the temptation to preach, prosecute, or politick. Treat your emerging view as a hunch or a hypothesis and test it with data. Like the entrepreneurs who learned to approach their business strategies as experiments, you’ll maintain the agility to pivot.

Aspiring entrepreneurs should prioritize learning from the experiences of those who have faced challenges and setbacks in their entrepreneurial endeavors, rather than solely focusing on the stories of successful individuals. This approach helps mitigate the effects of ‘Survivorship bias,’ which can lead to an unrealistic perception of entrepreneurial success.

Aspiring entrepreneurs should not blindly replicate the business models of existing successful businesses. Instead, they should actively explore emerging technologies to uncover new opportunities tailored to the current business environment.

A platform pivot refers to a change from an application to a platform or vice versa. Most commonly, startups that aspire to create a new platform begin life by selling a single application, the so-called killer app, for their platform. Only later does the platform emerge as a vehicle for third parties to leverage as a way to create their own related products. However, this order is not always set in stone, and some companies have to execute this pivot multiple times.

When Jia Jiang graduated with an MBA from Duke, he wanted to be an entrepreneur. Like so many of us, however, his fear of hearing no was holding him back. To face this fear head-on, he started a video blog called 100 Days of Rejection Therapy. His endearing, perplexing, and absurd videos document what happened as he approached complete strangers, day after day, with off-the-wall requests: to speak over Costco’s intercom, to become a live mannequin at Abercrombie and Fitch, or to borrow a dog from the Humane Society. I love his rejections so much that I challenge my students to replicate them. Jia’s tolerance for rejection and vulnerability reveal the delight and playfulness that can emerge out of the most awkward situations.

Third, the idea that venture capitalists get into deals on the strength of their brands can be exaggerated. A deal seen by a partner at Sequoia will also be seen by rivals at other firms: in a fragmented cottage industry, there is no lack of competition. Often, winning the deal depends on skill as much as brand: it’s about understanding the business model well enough to impress the entrepreneur; it’s about judging what valuation might be reasonable. One careful tally concluded that new or emerging venture partnerships capture around half the gains in the top deals, and there are myriad examples of famous VCs having a chance to invest and then flubbing it.[6] Andreessen Horowitz passed on Uber. Its brand could not save it. Peter Thiel was an early investor in Stripe. He lacked the conviction to invest as much as Sequoia. As to the idea that branded venture partnerships have the “privilege” of participating in supposedly less risky late-stage investment rounds, this depends from deal to deal. A unicorn’s momentum usually translates into an extremely high price for its shares. In the cases of Uber and especially WeWork, some late-stage investors lost millions. Fourth, the anti-skill thesis underplays venture capitalists’ contributions to portfolio companies. Admittedly, these contributions can be difficult to pin down. Starting with Arthur Rock, who chaired the board of Intel for thirty-three years, most venture capitalists have avoided the limelight. They are the coaches, not the athletes. But this book has excavated multiple cases in which VC coaching made all the difference. Don Valentine rescued Atari and then Cisco from chaos. Peter Barris of NEA saw how UUNET could become the new GE Information Services. John Doerr persuaded the Googlers to work with Eric Schmidt. Ben Horowitz steered Nicira and Okta through their formative moments. To be sure, stories of venture capitalists guiding portfolio companies may exaggerate VCs’ importance: in at least some of these cases, the founders might have solved their own problems without advice from their investors. But quantitative research suggests that venture capitalists do make a positive impact: studies repeatedly find that startups backed by high-quality VCs are more likely to succeed than others.[7] A quirky contribution to this literature looks at what happens when airline routes make it easier for a venture capitalist to visit a startup. When the trip becomes simpler, the startup performs better.[8]

A few years ago, a team that sells products to large media companies invited me to help them as a consultant because they were concerned that their engineers were not working hard enough. However, the fault was not in the engineers; it was in the process the whole company was using to make decisions. They had customers but did not know them very well. They were deluged with feature requests from customers, the internal sales team, and the business leadership. Every new insight became an emergency that had to be addressed immediately. As a result, long-term projects were hampered by constant interruptions. Even worse, the team had no clear sense of whether any of the changes they were making mattered to customers. Despite the constant tuning and tweaking, the business results were consistently mediocre.

The current reality of information being sold for prices that only education can justify is unsustainable, and the market is going to split in two: low-priced information, and premium education. Companies and investors are already rushing to seize the opportunity of online education – but because of their need for scale, it remains out of their reach. The only way to do it properly is the piloting process described in this chapter, which is eminently suited for the solo entrepreneur who cares about making an income by making an impact.

Mara Foundation is the nonprofit side of Mara’s business, a social enterprise focused on emerging entrepreneurs. We have myriad programs designed to address the complete life cycle of an entrepreneur’s business idea, from start-up advice right through to venture capital. My sister Rona, the foundation director, has been a dynamic force in ongoing advocacy for youth and women in business. Always someone with a keen eye for detail, she has secured partnerships for the Foundation with Ernst & Young to nurture and develop small and medium entrepreneurs (SMEs) in Africa and with UN Women, whose UN Women’s Knowledge Gateway for Women’s Economic Empowerment has operations in 80 countries. A spin-off of this is a program called Mara Mentor—tagline: Enable, Empower and Inspire—an online community that connects budding entrepreneurs with experienced and inspiring business leaders around the world.

This is a fallacy—note for now the disproportionate contribution of uneducated technicians and entrepreneurs to various technological leaps, from the Industrial Revolution to the emergence of Silicon Valley,

KEY TAKEAWAYS •Always keep your eyes on the prize. •Keep putting money in your business—it’s crucial to continued growth. •Think big, act big, but never forget your roots. •Never settle—keep setting new goals as you reach old ones. •Create a niche for your business, and don’t try to be the low-cost king; it doesn’t pay off. •Keep adapting and reinvesting in your business. •Embrace technology—it’s the way of the future, and understanding how it works will help your business succeed.

Shakespeare said that promptness is the courtesy of kings. It’s the courtesy we owe everyone in our lives. And if you aren’t planning on showing up on time for client calls, meetings, or other essential moments on your calendar, there’s really no point in reading the rest of the book!

And when you make it big, find a mentor for dealing with success. I had Lewis Katz, a lawyer who went into business and got so wealthy he and a few of his partners owned part of the New Jersey Nets, the New Jersey Devils, and the New York Yankees. I mention Lew because he passed away two years ago in a plane crash and I miss him. I remember I went to Lew in 1995, after I first sold half of Wilmar, and asked him, “Lew, you’ve been wealthy for a long time. Will you help me understand how you deal with money and family?” Lew gave me some great advice. And he won’t be the last mentor I have. You think I’m done learning new things? It never ends! So go find some mentors!

But when the cosmo-in-a-glass came out, it was red, not pink. And our apple martinis were dark green when they should have been pale green. That may seem like no big deal, but it killed the product. No one knew what they were. They didn’t look like cosmos or apple martinis, so no one bothered. You see, I didn’t sweat the small stuff and it bit me in the ass. My partners convinced me that the color didn’t matter. Well guess what? It mattered! The business tanked and I lost money. Bottom line: if it doesn’t work perfectly, throw it out and get it right. Because if you don’t, one of your competitors will!

Don’t worry, it’ll work out.” Really? How do you know? It’s unbelievable. When your business partners tell you not to worry because “It’ll work out”—it’s not going to work out. You can’t just sit back and wait for life to happen because when you do, unexpected stuff usually happens. You have to be smart. You have to be prepared. You have to go in with your guns loaded and a well-devised plan of attack. I can’t stress this enough. When starting your own business, “winging it” is not an option. Repeat after me: knowledge is power. Why do you think it’s one of the most overused aphorisms out there? Because it’s true! If you are about to make a sales pitch to a customer and you ask your salesperson, “What’s the plan?” and he or she says, “Oh, we’ll wing it,” you’re in trouble. Anytime one of my guys said that, my stomach turned. It drove me nuts. I’d say, “We’ve got to know everything about this prospect. We’ve got to know everything about this company. Do your homework!” The more you know about a customer, a product, a market, or even an employee, the greater advantage you have. And I’m not just talking about business and sales; I’m talking about everything you do in this world. You can’t just wing it through life. You’ll never end up where you want to be if you don’t know where you’re going.

KEY TAKEAWAYS •Believe in yourself—make it your daily mantra. •Find a mentor—you can always learn something new. •Always be on time. The early bird catches the worm. •Treat everyone with kindness and respect, especially the “gatekeepers” to success. •Return calls and texts in 24 hours or less—response builds customer loyalty. •Sweat every detail. •Dress for success, even if you’re down on your luck. •Know your target market and whether your product can succeed. •Selling a necessary product is easier than selling a luxury. •Don’t reinvent the wheel—let someone else do that. •Leave nothing to chance.

KEY TAKEAWAYS •You may be born to sell, but a will to succeed is even better. •What goes around, comes around—you never know when the wheel of fortune is going to turn for or against you. Be prepared for either outcome. •Don’t let adversity keep you down—harness that energy to fuel your passion. •Be willing to do whatever it takes to optimize your potential. •Recognize a great idea when it appears. •If you have an idea, act on it; there’s no time like the present. •Don’t burn bridges—you never know who or what may come back to help you in the future.

researchers who examined the semiconductor industry found that firms in growing markets were much more successful than firms in mature or emerging markets.

Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Small Discoveries by Peter Sims and The Lean Startup: How Today’s Entrepreneurs Use Continuous Innovation to Create

This is the shape that Renaissance innovation takes, seen from a great (conceptual) distance. Most innovation clusters in the third quadrant: non-market individuals. A handful of outliers are scattered fairly evenly across the other three quadrants. This is the pattern that forms when information networks are slow and unreliable, and entrepreneurial economic conventions are poorly developed. It’s too hard to share ideas when the printing press and the postal system are still novelties, and there’s not enough incentive to commercialize those ideas without a robust marketplace of buyers and investors. And so the era is dominated by solo artists: amateur investigators, usually well-to-do, working on their own private obsessions. Not surprisingly, this period marks the birth of the modern notion of the inventive genius, the rogue visionary who somehow sees beyond the horizon that limits his contemporaries—da Vinci, Copernicus, Galileo. Some of those solo artists (Galileo most famously) worked outside of broader groups because their research posed a significant security threat to the established powers of the day. The few innovations that did emerge out of networks—the portable, spring-loaded watches that first appeared in Nuremberg in 1480, the double-entry bookkeeping system developed by Italian merchants—have their geographic origins in cities, where information networks were more robust. First-quadrant solo entrepreneurs, crafting their products in secret to ensure their eventual payday, turn out to be practically nonexistent. Gutenberg was the exception, not the rule.